Project Zomboid in 2022

[rampantjesus]

So, while searching through the forums, I noticed that the last major discussions regarding this game were back in 2011/2012.

Well, a decade later and the game has come quite a long way. I've only started playing over this last year, but long-time fans keep telling me how surprised they are with how much more content has been added, and how different the game looks and plays.

 

For those who don't know, Project Zomboid is, in my opinion, one of the best zombie survival games on the market right now. It's in an "incomplete" state still, but it really doesn't incomplete to me.

 

The game takes place in 1993 in the area surrounding Fort Knox in Kentucky (now including Louisville). You begin the game on Day 3 of the apocalypse. Townsfolk complained about a noxious smell in the air a couple of weeks ago. After all phone lines were taken down for "maintenance", a military blockade was put in place. Over the next couple of weeks, your character can catch several radio and television broadcasts (while the power is still on) that detail the spread of the pandemic out of the initial infection area, slowly consuming the entire world.

 

Your only objective is to survive. It's up to you to decide how exactly to go about it. Really, once you learn the basic mechanics of the game, you're only limited by your imagination. You can hole up in your house, gathering tools and supplies from the surrounding neighborhood. You can decide to bug-out, find some camping supplies and live in the woods, only returning to towns for absolute necessities. You can go full sicko mode, looting gun stores and reclaiming huge swathes of territory.

 

Probably the best feature of the game is the fully customizable sandbox. You can tweak this game to play out exactly how you want it to. Here's a full list of all the settings that can be adjusted each playthrough. 

 

The game received a fresh injection of interest six months ago with the release of a stable multiplayer build and a whole host of new features. It sold like crazy, doing numbers somewhere around 23x their normal sales numbers, and sat at #4 on Steam for about a month. It got covered by people on YouTube and other sites, which brought even more attention. So, the developers are now sitting on a nice pile of cash and charging forward to finish up features for what they would consider a "finished" game.

 

They're also one of the only development studios I've seen that has both detailed several features that they do or do not want to see in the final product.

 

I think right now, they're actively working on adding animals. That will include domestication and all that. If I remember correctly, NPCs will follow shortly after.

 

So yeah, if you haven't had a chance to look at this game since 2012, I'd say it's definitely worth your time. Although not the price of a sandwich, you can pick it up on sale until July 7th for the price of a large Big Mac meal plus tax ($13.39). If you're ok with it, I've also seen it for as low as $6.40 on some key reseller websites.