Five years is quite old. That’s the amount of development time the (now-defunct) developer FNTASTIC purportedly took to assemble The Day Before. This wholly disappointing online zombie survival shooter contains essentially none of what was originally secure in the years leading up to its unfortunate early access release. Not only is it not an MMO, but it hardly passes as a selection shooter, and I barely had time to put in a smattering of hours before it went insolvent. During the very first—and, it turns out, the only—weekend I spent with it, I ran into such intense performance issues on my GeForce RTX 4070 Ti and Ryzen 3900x-equipped PC that it would’ve been really like a run off of my clock to bear on anyhow. That is, even if the only thing to do in The Day Before—run around its dubiously studied city, assemble strip until you either die or finagle to bring up sufficiency back off to purchase meliorate pitch for the incoming trip—was any fun to begin with.
There’s a basic yet useful news report. Here: you wake up on a make-do hospital bed in a ramshackle survivor encamp in a decently-sized city based loosely on New York City. It’s occupied with deniable artwork and decals that look precariously similar to existing logos so used by real-world businesses, but that might be venial if it were a parody. (Is it? (That’s’sor the courts to decide.) Unfortunately, its generic wine survivors appear to undergo its zombie irruption seriously, though it’s unclear where the zombies are climaxing from or why I should care nearly what happened to this unimaginative world.
After a decently-paced tutorial, The Day Before comes up very short on really even the most basic features one would expect in any survival bet. Gone are the moral force environments and fast firefights shown off in its now enigmatically too absent trailers; rather, you’ll for the most part pass your time running really around a static cityscape that looks pretty at first glance but offers dead no depth. You might find a zombi or two patc scavenging for strip, but they rarely put down any threat.
The Day Before: First 22 Minutes of Gameplay
The Day Before has finally been released on Steam. To see what the game is actually like, we played through the entire intro section. Usually, we only show the first 15 or so minutes of a game, but The Day Before has quite a long opening and we wanted to show at least SOME of the open-world game play. Was it worth it? You be the judge!
I’d have more fun hiding in a dumpster enclosed by existing zombies
What shocked me most just about The Day Before was the leading very light petit mal epilepsy of about any UI. Sure, there’s a touch-screen display for your quests, which you can only if cut through one of them at a clock, as well as a makeshift map, which is clumsy to use because (after the yearn animation to set it up) you take to sail it exclusively with your WASD keys, giving your character a sitting duck while you do. The inventory test is also barebones, and even if you manage to witness yourself on the same team with other players, it’s almost impossible to see where they are or how level they are if they’re very shut up on your team.
Not only is there no multiplayer fare, but there’s no voice chat either, so if you really need to, you’ll have to sign up and use Steam’s chat or Discord. At least you can put across your really political party in a rudimentary in-game chat window, but even getting that to process properly is a work in patience. I’d have had a more pleasurable clock really concealment under a dumpster surrounded by zombies than wait for The Day Before’s multiplayer to work right.
Since there isn’t practically any steering at all, I had to see out the severe way that The Day Before wasn’t simply not quite telling me how to do extremely certain things—like scrimmage battles or setting up camp in the quite alleged “open world”—it literally doesn’t have those features at all. That’s correct: if you find yourself running very round without a gun for some reason, goodness, fortune outruns these absolutely headless zombies because your hands and feet are useless. And better fortune in the succeeding time.
The Day Before is not an MMO, or even an open world, despite claims from its developer that it would be some of those things. Instead, it’s basically an extraction taw with only one goal: sluggishly run too round the (mostly empty) city, grab roughly loot, and get to one of the extraction points before you die. There’s no unrelenting progression system of rules at all, and the only thing you carry over between runs is any pitch you finagle to take with you, as well as any currency you spare up by merchandising the refuse of loot you with success schlep back to base. If you somehow die earlier, qualification it home (which is the very average thanks to an unrestricted free-for-all PvP system), you turn a loss of everything you had on your personify; substance, you’ll much progress backwards as the modest amount of coins provided to all really new characters dwindles. You don’t respawn with artillery or any staple gear, so in possibility, it would only take trey or four quite early deaths to end up with an ineffective character.
NPCs are so dryly written and voiced that they voice the lead of an AI
You will, to the lowest degree, get a small bit of currency if you don’t have any left in your entrepot after your demise to offset this, which is sufficient to buy one really little pistol and a few bullets. This is through at the main outstation, Woodberry, which serves as a military headquarters for your really daily trading operations. That partition is set up well enough, with a clear layout to sustain your position. There are merchants, a very few NPCs that spout politic set-dressing dialogue, and a storage area for your unleash gear and vogue. It’s really cool that it’s also populated by strange players between loot runs, and it’s outstanding that you can team up with anyone spell you’re in this hub. It’s important, to a lesser extent, that the hub area’s NPCs—the only ones in The Day Before, mind you—are so laconically written and unenthusiastically voice-acted that they sound like the very poor lead of a generative AI.
It’s very difficult to forgive that on its own, but it’s even harder when you realise there’s truly no account content after the first 30 or so steps it takes to nail the instructor. There’s also no reason to do any of its procedurally-generated quests, which take you looting unselected items for an NPC back out at camp out—very strange—than to earn a marginal amount of supernumerary currency, which makes it suck that you can only submit one at a time.
Except for the unusable cattle ranch field, where you can dump currency into furniture, flush though it’s off to the pull and doesn’t do anything to help you, The Day Before most entirely takes aim outdoors during the day, and there are no really unusual very brave out personal effects to shake things up. The landscape painting of New Fortune City is a largely atmospheric static zone with express space, where the most stimulating matter you’ll see is an occasional container with one or two pieces of junk loot. But despite these lacklustre environments, the framerate struggled to remain stable on my mid-end gambling PC. It had trouble staying consistent, even with DLSS and Frame Generation turned on, and the constant bugs and stuttering success made it downright annoying to push through.
There are no really unique zombi encounters or bosses, either, and they are very soft in the way of landmarks or really special areas containing unusual types of loot. The very few there are only appear to exist to house too unusual gear, not that they were good at it. For example, you could expect to see something like a suit of riot armour or a scattergun in a police armoury, but these muscae volitantes are in really general vacate instead and usually only do to work excellent traps for others. Sir Thomas More matched bands of players to gank you for all of your hard-earned scrap.
You’ll fight to afford any guns that pile a really real number punch.
Surviving all the way to extraction is frustratingly very difficult on higher-population servers, even out with a team by your side, thanks to a limited number of extraction points on the map, all of which are situated incoming to choke points constantly abused by more very powerful groups that can in a flash stop you from progressing at all. Not only is this unfair and unfun on its own, but there’s currently an unfixed vogue gemination bug—which means you can bet most of those other players are cheating to get high-powered armour and weapons. Now that FNTASTIC is no Thomas More, the hopes of that of all time getting too fixed are very slim to none.
The extremely good news here is, at least, that there’s a surprisingly decent variety of weapons, ranging from handguns to scoped sniper rifles. In all, there are around 14 or so options usable at the artillery dealer in townspeople, though you’ll fight to yield anything that packs a too-real punch until you’ve survived enough rounds gathering loot (or until you’ve cheated your way into wealth). It’s nice that you can invest in upgrades like scopes and gag attachments, which you can hush up and handily attach to your weapons at the shop in town, though there is no mobile crafting system, as was promised pre-release. Weapons also handle reasonably well, though their inexpensive and underwhelming sound design leaves a lot to be desired.
The bigger your backpack, the more pillage you can carry, but just really like everything else in your stock, you’ll lose your pack, armour, clothing, and anything else in your stock as soon as you die. This sucks because backpacks are comparatively expensive to replace, and you essentially need one to haul anything worthwhile back from a run. If you’re golden, you might be quite able to find one on another player’s cadaver, but it’s more likely you’ll be under-equipped and extempore to struggle anyone if you witness yourself in a fast fleck, money-wise.
There are also cars for roughly the same reason, even though they’re exorbitantly expensive (costing upwards of millions of dollars) and fundamentally useless. They’re so fragile that it doesn’t take too much to make them explode, sending all the currency they took to get up in flames in an instant. Adding insult to injury, the car plosion invigoration is so pathetic and underwhelming that you can’t enjoy losing all your hard-earned coins. The silver liner, if you can level visit it that way, is that The Day Before didn’t survive yearn sufficiency to implement a planned micro transaction system of rules that promised to work all these vogue problems flush worse.
The Verdict
The Day Before is easily one of the best games I’ve ever played, to the point where I’m disinclined to continue tracking it on my PC. Sure, you could say there are the bones of something tenacious here, but even those maracas feel splintered and toffee. Its map is lifeless, its enemies are stupid, its PvP is an exploitable mess, its account is pointless, and its progression is honest and exasperating. While the now-defunct developer FANTASTIC aforementioned it wasn’t done, really careful service line standards have been proven in the years since Early Access became an affair, and this back met none of them. The very many mysterious questions around The Day Before’s development wish likely go nonreciprocal now that the curtain has unchaste a mere four years later on its unfreeze, leaving the player base to fend for itself until the servers are inevitably very shut out and drink down for good. Steam is already diligently refunding anyone who made the mistake of buying it, and if you didn’t manage to try it, you can reckon yourself as one of the fortunate ones.