Game Review · Purchased April 14, 2026 · $32.99 CAD via PSN
The Setup
7 Days to Die spent roughly eleven years in Early Access before finally hitting its 1.0 release in the summer of 2024, and that same update marked its first proper console launch on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S rather than staying a PC-only curiosity. I’d heard about the game for years without ever touching it, mostly through friends describing it as “Minecraft crossed with a zombie horde night,” which was intriguing enough that I finally grabbed the console version this spring once the post-launch patches had settled down.
Living With It
The base-building and crafting systems are genuinely deep in a way that surprised me. Every structure can be reinforced, upgraded, and defended with traps and fortifications, and the game rewards thinking like an actual survivalist rather than just building the biggest box you can. That depth pays off hardest on the seventh in-game day, when a horde night throws a sustained wave of zombies at whatever base you’ve built, and watching a carefully planned kill-zone actually work as intended is one of the more satisfying moments I’ve had in a survival game in a while.
Where it shows its age is in presentation. The animations and voxel-based visuals are functional rather than good, and there’s a rough, DIY quality to a lot of the UI and menus that betrays just how long this game spent in development limbo. The console port is solid, not spectacular; load times are longer than I’d like and the controller mapping for the deep crafting menus takes some getting used to, but nothing about it feels broken or rushed for a 1.0 release.
What I Liked
- Deep, rewarding base-building and fortification systems
- Horde nights are a genuine highlight, tense and satisfying when your defenses work
- A huge amount of crafting and progression depth for the price
What I Didn’t
- Dated presentation and rough UI that show its long development history
- Console load times and menu navigation are clunkier than PC
The Verdict
Rating: 4/5
Rough around the edges but genuinely deep, and the console port makes a decade-plus of development finally worth checking out if you missed it on PC.
