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And the WGOTY goes to… | Early Access Review - The Day Before

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The Day Before

4.3

Open World Survival CraftPost-apocalypticSurvivalZombiesActionRealisticMassively MultiplayerOnline Co-Op

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✨Overview

The Day Before is a survival horror extraction shooter with multiplayer elements, it was initially hyped as a massive multiplayer experience, comparable to The Division or DayZ. However, it's off to a rocky Early Access start with numerous delays leading up to this Early Access release, trademark disputes, and major performance issues. The game's ambitious promises have not been met, leading to widespread disappointment among players.

⭐️Score: 1/10

📖Story and Premise

The game lacks a central story, though there are minor cutscenes and dialogues with NPCs that establish the game's core gameplay loops. You create your own character, and the premise begins with you being discovered unconscious amidst the zombie apocalypse by the well-off and surprisingly prosperous settlement known as Woodbury. They decide to take you in and register you as a new resident and then your personal story begins.

☝️First Impressions

After having bottom-level expectations going into the game, the introduction sequence is surprisingly decent, evoking vibes reminiscent of The Division with a touch of GTA V. I found myself saying, "It's not that bad." The tour around the settlement is quite pleasant, with a cozy atmosphere, showcasing the settlement's size, friendly NPC inhabitants, and other players running around in a shared instance setting. While the voice acting is passable, the facial animations are virtually nonexistent and seem to have been made without much effort. As I play a bit more, it becomes apparent that the introduction was the absolute peak of the game.

🎨Graphics and Art Style

What was initially showcased in the debut trailer as a beautifully detailed open world has given way to embarrassing, low-poly textures and plain character models. While it still looks somewhat passable, the graphical downgrade from the flashy trailer is disappointing, and the overall visual experience falls short of the promised standard. Honestly, it looks just on par or even worse the Grand Theft Auto V, a game that was released 10 years ago, and that game runs effortlessly now in today’s modern hardware.

🎮Gameplay

The Day Before was marketed as an open-world MMO with survival elements, but the reality is far from it. The game leans more towards being an online extraction shooter with limited features, and they probably switched it up in development when they realized they can’t pull off the open-world MMO element with the resources that they have, or it may have been the plan all along.

Players have a certain hub: the Woodbury settlement in which you can buy stuff like meds, gear, and weapons; a storage to safekeep your items, because dying while outside means losing all your equiped gear. It’s not fully open-world, you just decide to go out into the city at any time and the game will load you into a random entry point. You can take on missions from NPCs so you’d have some sense of direction while looting but the experience is largely uninspired. You can go to an extraction point to go back to Woodbury. That's basically it. Woodbury, Loot the city, extract. Rinse and repeat until you can buy more gear, house decorations, or vehicles.

The city is big enough —- I would hand it to them — but it’s not enough of an experience. Looting is half-baked and you don’t even know which containers or items are lootable and which aren’t. Loot is sparse, and even the zombies are almost non-existent. I roamed around the city for a while, and only saw three zombies; seriously they could have restored society back since zombies are almost gone.

Playing it more, there are indeed quite a few hot spots of zombies here and there that gave me some challenge, and just when I was starting to get some semblance of enjoyment, the game crashed. What’s worse? When I reloaded back, all my items are gone, my character is completely stripped for no reason.

If you are old enough to have been part of the early Arma 2 DayZ mod days, this is basically the same experience but worse considering this is already 10 years later; buggy, clunky, and barely works. The DayZ mod even did many things better than this Early Access game.

⚔️Combat

Combat in The Day Before is as basic shooter as it is, with enemy AI also being overly simplistic. If you’re quite adept at Unreal Engine, you’ll probably come up with a better combat system in a day, using off-the-shelf animations and script packges. There is no melee system, so you can’t defend yourself once you run out of bullets, and the hits and reactions from zombies are noticeably delayed.

⏫Progression

The main gameplay loop of the game is to go into the city, loot and complete some missions, and then extract back to get more money. Anytime you die in the city, you lose all the gear you bring, so it’s a matter of balancing resources and being careful in how you roam outside. There are three character classes to choose from when creating a character, some basic weapon customization, but with minimal differences that it’s almost a placeholder feature at this point.

There is also a personal land plot that you can develop, wherein you can build a tent, cabin, place furnitures around, and even buy vehicles… ala GTA V. but the prices are so absurd that it’s almost impossible to buy these without intense grinding, which defeats the purpose of testing the game in Early Access, when things are locked to pointless impossible grinding.

📊Technical Performance

The game suffers from massive stutter issues, crashes, and bugs. Falling through the floor, losing items, renegade UI elements, and server de-syncs are commonly experienced here. Usually Early Access games gets a pass from these kind of issues, but in The Day Before its actually that bad. It’s probably one of the worst Early Access games ever released. Additionally, Controller support is very partially implemented, and not usable at the moment.

⚖️Conclusion

Now, as highly anticipated as this game was, it has also been universally disliked even before its release. The early and ongoing dislike largely arises from the game's false advertising practices and suspicious delays; compounded by its poor, incomplete, and buggy state at the moment. However, beneath all this mediocrity lies a decent zombie survival game concept waiting to happen. It’s a shame that this wasn’t the same game that was shown during the E3 reveal, and it probably never will be. I do hope some other publisher/developer decides to pick up the concept and craft an actually great game from it.

If it wasn’t in Early Access, it can actually go toe-to-toe with Walking Dead: Destinies for the Worst Game Of The Year award (WGOTY). Is it no coincidence that they're both games about zombies? You be the judge. At least Walking Dead has an intriguing narrative.

Overall, my initial experience has been absolute far from stellar. The Steam page is flooded with negative reviews, and unfortunately, I have to join the chorus. I do not recommend this game, and I would advise you to simply forget about it if you're even the slightest bit interested.

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The Day Before

4.3

Open World Survival CraftPost-apocalypticSurvivalZombiesActionRealisticMassively MultiplayerOnline Co-Op

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