DAYZ Review

In the early days of Arma, there were gunships, tanks, helicopters, people jumping out of planes, even a hillbilly tribe in the mountains. But there was never one thing. Zombies.

Now most of us live in a world without zombies (excluding us gamers) which is quite typical for most, live your life, earn money, waste it and then complain about it. But we gamers know, anything can be improved with the addition of zombies. Anything. So that’s what the team behind DayZ decided to do, to design a realistic horror modification that was designed to be ‘the ultimate survival horror’ after spending hours playing this game, I can completely and utterly agree with that statement, no other survival zombie game can touch this one.

Basically when you start the game all you have is some food and a torch, nothing else, you have notifications that monitor your food level, water level, blood level, how much noise you’re making and how visible you are. Sound simple? It isn’t. Almost everything in DayZ affects the players or zombies in a way, the difference between walking on road and walking on grass can save your life (trust me, I’ve died about 4 times now) walking on the road makes a lot of noise and is open, while grass lessens the noise you make, the notifications you have on the side actually don’t notify you at all, you have to constantly check them or you’re easy kill for zombies.

This is where the dynamics change. There are other players in the world, ones that interact or shoot on sight, depending on how they feel or how desperate they are they will kill you and take your stuff, but you can do the same to them. Basically this game makes you beyond paranoid of everyone and everything, that’s what sets it apart from most games, the sense of trust you can evoke on somebody can be turned upside down in a split second, you could be in a group of people when suddenly one person will mow you down.

This all adds up to the effect it has on you as a person, do you want to find other players? Or do you want to rather become a bandit, finding and killing other players to steal their belongings? Or do you want to be a beacon of hope but still stealthy, sticking with a group but being ready to leave at a moment’s notice.

DayZ is a game of pure genius, utilising the Arma II engine beautifully it is a game full of bugs, but still without faults. The mod is still in Alpha so a lot of work is still being put into it