Night of the Dead is an excellent attempt at making a “better survival game” that unfortunately falls just short of doing so.
Singleplayer.
Co-op Multiplayer.
PvP Multiplayer.
The main issue I have with Night of the Dead is it feels like a game that was originally planned to be a simple “sexy girl” game, and over time, the developers tried to make it into a real survival game,.
While they have done a pretty good job of that, and some mechanics feel like more polished versions of those found in other survival games, overall, it falls short of being the unmissable evolution of the zombie survival genre that it could have been if early development wasn’t so focused on making Lucy the sexiest person on the island.
A perfect example of this is how unprepared the developers appeared to be when making a multiplayer survival game.
Players are limited to only a few options when modifying their game, and even then, those options are essentially hardcoded.
Server admins are forced to choose from a small selection of preset modifiers, such as raising experience gain to a maximum of 5X and item drop rate to 3X.
While I am sure that makes the game much easier, players should be able to decide what drop rate is a good fit for their community and not be restricted in how they can modify their single-player or multiplayer game.
In addition, server admins have few tools for running their servers beyond banning players and setting a message of the day.
Even the ability to spawn in items and summon hordes would have gone a long way towards making Night of the Dead a more viable server-based game; as it is, server admins have almost no control over their server, making for a generally unpleasant experience for all, with server admins having almost no power to deal with troublesome users and no way to create events or compensate players for lost or missing items.
Night of the Dead feels tedious when playing on standard (non-custom) difficulty settings. After building my base, I went AFK for almost 90 minutes, waiting to trigger the nightly horde.
While some games run too fast and day and night blur together, there is no reason to make Night of the Dead run at 1/6 real-time (4 real hours per in-game day).
Spending hours cutting down trees to get a handful of leaves and maybe one or two planks worth of wood per fully grown tree is not a great way to spend a few hours, especially when the greatest danger I faced in the open world was finding enough to eat, as most zombies were unable to damage even a moderately armed and armoured player, thanks to how overpowered the AI companions were in the early game.
That being said, AI companions do help to make playing solo less lonely, and honestly, I wish the developers placed more emphasis on taking over abandoned buildings than building your own structures, especially when prebuilt structures are stronger, better designed, better looking, and better for role-play than a solo survival deciding to cut down half a forest and build a log cabin when a perfectly serviceable brick house was right next door, and provided a much better living experience.
That being said, being able to build a flying base is awesome, and I wish that were the main use of the building system, instead of wooden boxes that have the strength of cardboard.
Night of the Dead should copy 7 Days to Die’s homework by allowing players to either build a base or take over a prebuilt structure and fortify it at leisure while performing cosmetic and functional repairs.
Turning a run-down shack into a warm and well-defended base is one of my favourite things about playing 7 Days to Die, and being forced to live in a wooden box while a whole street of better houses was empty just seconds away took away my desire to play a minute longer than I needed to.
This brings me to another issue I had with Night of the Dead: buildings felt like props more than actual structures, and hiding out in a prebuilt house made much more sense than spending the night in my base, which fell to zombies within minutes.
It’s important to note that the same horde of zombies took almost 30 minutes to break open the door of the small premade cabin I was hiding in.
Even then, they made no effort to destroy more than the doorway, allowing me to poke a horde to death while remaining safely out of reach.
Nightly hordes and an abundance of traps could have made for such a great expierance, but as it stands, placing a single trap next to a chainlink fence gate is enough to defeat early game hordes, and placing more than one trap or a few extra towers is enough to see out an entire early game horde night without so much as breaking a sweat on normal difficulty.
Before I go on, I must stress that I did not hate Night of the Dead.
Having a narrative to follow (even if it was rather weak) and being able to recruit companions was really enjoyable, especially when exploring large indoor locations that functioned like dungeons, with increased danger and reward awaiting those who ventured inside.
I wish the developers had focused more on this part of the game, as it was frankly the best part and, without doubt, the part I enjoyed the most.
Recruiting companions, going on missions, and upgrading a prebuilt home base while fighting off occasional enemy base invasions may sound familiar, as it has been done before (Fortnite Save the World).
However, the fact Fortnite Save the World is still played by around 1 million players each day, years after development resources were relocated to Fortnite Battle Royale, shows that there is a market for it, certainly a larger market than there is for yet another “sexy girl fights zombies” game.
While some may dismiss the developer’s initial focus on making a sexy survival game as a non-issue, I feel strongly that making your main character’s only real characteristic is her large and well-oiled bust shows that the developers were originally catering to a very different demographic than the survival genre, and it just so happens they found a way to appeal two markets, despite originally appealing primarily to the “lonely pervert” demographic.
While there is a time and place for showing some skin in games, there needs to be more to a game than sexy girls, especially if you want to make a game that does more than cause people to lust after pixels, a tremendous and spiritually dangerous waste of time.
While Night of the Dead does have more to offer than sexy girls and the occasional sexy zombie (in both male and female varieties), it bares the scares of its horny past. It will never be taken seriously by the vast majority of survival gamers.
Night of the Dead is a survival video game developed and published by Jackto Studios, it was released on 28 August 2020 and retails for $29.99.
Night of the Dead is available exclusively on PC.
As of June 2024, around 5,000 people play Night of the Dead on a fairly regular basis.
Night of the Dead suffers from low activity, and while a moderate number of players continue to log in regularly, finding an active server is not easy and may require playing on a server with very high latency.
Night of the Dead offers the following matchmaking options:
The following peripherals are officially supported:
Night of the Dead is unrated and contains:
Night of the Dead is a very decent survival game that honestly has suffered due to its original launch as little more than a “sexy girl survival game,” it alternated with a huge part of the survival community and generally portrayed the developers as immature.
While the game has matured in more ways than one and even allows for male playable characters, marketing doesn’t seem to have read that memo, with the majority of key art featuring canon character Lucy and her impressive cleavage, which seems to get shinier with each new iteration of her design.
I think it’s fantastic to see a survival game feature a female character, but many other survival games have done so in a far more tasteful manner by designing their female characters to appeal to female players instead of designing their female characters exclusively to appeal to the lonely male gaze.
Overall, Night of the Dead is a pretty solid survival game, which fans of the survival genre will enjoy, but there are much better survival games available at similar and even lower prices that offer drastically more content and more players to interact with as you enjoy that content.
