Impressions of Day Z

The zombie genre was originally conceived as a vehicle for the exploration of human nature. We are meant to ask ourselves, against the backdrop of hordes of the living dead, who are the real monsters? Is it the humans? Is it the zombies? Well as it turns out, at least in the case of Day Z, it's sheer damn boredom. More deadly than any glitchy zombie I came across were the long series of empty houses, the hours of playing on a full server without seeing a single human being, and more painted on doors than you can shake your uselessly ineffective baseball bat at.

Now before everyone starts crying alpha, here me out. I get it. Day Z is in early access. The game is not finished yet, and apparently that absolves it from any kind of criticism. With that being the case, I’d like to thank you for taking part in the early access of my Day Z review! Remember that this is an alpha build of the review, so things are subject to change, and you may experience review breaking bugs. I’ll still take your money though.

Day Z is designed to be a game of survival. In the coming zombie apocalypse, there will be an extreme scarcity of resources. Many essential items will be very difficult to come by, but hats are not one of them. My pockets were brimming with hats. You cannot get away from these F’n hats! In one of the stranger encounters I had while in game, a player knocked me unconscious with a couple of punches and I woke up with a hat on. I’m not making this up. This player was so driven mad by the abundance of hats in this game that he resorted to physical violence just to get rid of one. People are killing each other just to escape all these surplus hats. The real invasion humanity needs to be worried about is not one of the reanimated dead, but an invasion of cranial accessories. These hats need to be stopped.

There are two kinds of zombies that I came across in Day Z, and both have little to no regard for physical boundaries. The undead seem to have mastered the phenomenal power of quantum tunneling as they clip through any fence, house, or floor in their path. The first type is little more than decoration. It’s like the house cat of zombies. You’ll occasionally see him alongside some desolate road standing lonesome in an undead stupor just to remind you that you are in fact playing a zombie game. The second type of zombie is the first type’s over achieving older brother. This zombie will chase you to the ends of the earth and will never ever stop. He’s not fast enough to actually outpace you, but since your character will suffer a gushing wound from nothing more than a zombie fist bump, all this driven corpse needs to do is brush up against you in order to sign your death warrant.

Speaking of which, I have a theory that all humans in Day Z suffer from severe hemophilia. Their genetic condition renders them immune to the zombie virus because the virus attacks the proteins that contribute to our bodies clotting factor, which helps our platelets stick together and allows our wounds to naturally stop bleeding. Since hemophiliacs are missing the proteins that the zombie virus targets, they are immune! This is the only explanation I can come up with for the massive blood loss characters endure when a zombie comes anywhere within ten feet of them.

In conclusion, Day Z is hours spent combing over empty houses for useless junk punctuated by a psychopath with a rifle shooting you in the head.