Project Zomboid

Steam Reviews

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• Recommended Posted November 30, 2025 on Steam Often times I worry I will not live long enough to see the full release of this game. I am twenty-six years old.
• Recommended Posted March 23, 2026 on Steam Started development in 2011, hit Steam in 2013, and here we are in 2026, still in early access. At this point, it’s less like buying a game and more like investing in a family heirloom. Can’t wait for my grandkids to log in one day and enjoy the exact same early access I paid for.
• Recommended Posted July 5, 2025 on Steam Like an abusive ex, I always come back to it despite it beating me souless to the point I hate all 7000 whatever megabytes of this damn game.
• Recommended Posted November 1, 2025 on Steam (Build 42 review) Project Zomboid could be the most immersive zombie survival game out there, and it does feel very thrilling to play, at least initially. They nailed the atmosphere, the earlygame struggle and the moments of respite when you finally find a safe place to spend the night, or when you start setting up a base. There's also some mods and it's a decent Co-op game. It has a large map, and certainly enough content to entertain you for more than a hundred hours. It doesn't have great combat or much mechanical depth (Try Cataclysm: Dark Days ahead for that), in fact the mechanical depth and cohesion is my biggest issue with it, but the presentation is really nice. It falls into a weird semi-immersive niche that works if you just want to turn your brain off and "relax" in a post-apocalyptic setting... for a few days. And for that alone, I'd recommend it. It nails the atmosphere. The moment you peek behind the curtain and dive deeper however, the magic fades fast. Because a LOT of it is just a facade. The cooking system feels satisfying and creative, but once you realize how whacky the numbers are, it just reveals itself as another time waster. So does Smithing. So does keeping livestock, and farming, and hunting, and fishing, and trapping, and foraging... And this is where the cracks start to show. I'll take the game's food system as an example: You need 2k+ calories a day. They have whole layers of simuation for it. Great. Now, a full STEAK only gives 220 calories. An average cut of meat around 400. An egg 63. Vegetables around 30-100 per piece. ... You have to eat multiple deer worth of meat, every single day, to make back the calories you burn. You'd have to eat FORTY eggs, SIX+ cuts of prime meat, TWENTY cabbages... Every single day, to not keep losing weight. How does any of this make any sense? Especially when you start actually making food. A venison stew loaded with potatoes, carrots, eggs, spices, Oil. Took you many clicks to make. Will likely give you around 500 calories, less than a fourth of what your character burns through daily. Why? Because the numbers came straight from an otherworldly google calculator. Many of the new mechanics are like this, where I'm just left wondering who's designing this, and around what? You have all these complex systems, but are discouraged from actually engaging with any of them because it's just mechanically speaking a massive waste of time, simply because the NUMBERS aren't right. They simply don't make sense from a gameplay (or real life) perspective, with numbers based on a bastardized version of the real world: Carrots give 50 calories a piece. Does that make sense? Google says yes, but does it make SENSE? For our character, for one, to spend 90 days farming an entire field of 100+ crops, only to get around 2 days worth of calories back? Or for the player, to invest any sort of time into foraging, trapping, farming, when he can just walk to the nearest house (of which there are plenty) and grab a bag of lentils or some pasta that gives 3000+ calories on it's own? Or livestock: Yes, milk gives a lot of calories, and so does Butter. But does it make SENSE ingame for a single piece of butter (easy to produce) to be the only thing you'll ever need to eat, and the only thing that has any sort of calories and gives ANY sort of nutritional gain? Project Zomboid and its slow (but ultimately empty) updates feels like a game designed by tacking on pieces that sound good on paper with generic google-based placeholder values around a nonexistant frame where no one has ever stopped, looked at the whole thing and tried to make it make sense. Like there was a WISH there to make these mechanics work, but they just didn't. Like a new part of a building that didn't need to be made, an extra multi-step bedroom project that serves as a worse alternative to the already-existing old big bed (that for some reason required no effort to make but gives ten times the amount of sleep as anything you can ever make) They added all these advanced systems that require the player to put in effort, but there is NO reward for doing so, and all the old systems are still better. In fact, they're likely to just annoy you and cause you carpal tunnel with the amount of clicks you'll need to do, to get far inferior results than you'd get just walking around the map eating or using whatever you pick up. Which is a shame, because once you realize that it's best to just IGNORE all the deeper systems they added and just gorge down whatever Cereals, beans and peanut butter you can find, you're cutting out the majority of the long-term SURVIVOR gameplay because there is simply no reason to engage with it. And then it just becomes a "loot the map until you get bored" simulator. I just wish the devs PROPERLY designed their systems and sorted out the numerical numbers to make sense. Instead, we get entire cows that provide less calories than a jar of peanut butter, and entire fields of produce that amount to a day or two worth of dinner. And if you need a non-food mechanic example, try Smithing: Smithing is overdesigned and requires way too many specific items, for almost NO return. You have to spend so much time finding incredibly specific and (for some reason rare) spawns like Iron bands to start anything, because you need a specifically *crafted* Bucket to proceed. And even if you manage to set up a full forge, which will be a gargantuan multi-month task, all you get in return is LARP-tier armor that doesn't actually seem to do much other than weighing you down, because there is no proper armor system. You can still get bit even through layers of clothing or plate, you can still get swarmed and dragged down the moment there's more than 2 zombies on screen, you can still get backstabbed for guaranteed damage, and ONE bite can still infect and kill you. You just spent several ingame months for a slight % decrease to some of that happening. And guess what? A police vest you can find anywhere will likely still be better, because the fact that you can repair armor doesn't mean ♥♥♥♥ in a game where any attack can randomly pierce through and instantly doom you. I might come and revisit this review if the devs finally decide to actually balance their systems instead of just slotting them in with values derived from someone who has never eaten a single potato or steak in their life. As it stands, it's just not satisfying enough to play for more than a few ingame days of looting and shooting. When the main selling point is immersion, things like Calories can't stick out like such a sore thumb, because it just feels WRONG to chow down on complex stew and apple pie and still lose weight... and then eat a stick of butter and finally live a healthy AND less stressful life. So it's hard to recommend the game as anything but that: A zombie looter shooter with an ATTEMPT at a deeper, more meaningful long-term Survival RPG. With an attempt at immersion that gets thrown out the window the moment you peek behind the scenes. Maybe it will get there one day, maybe there'll be a big "Make it make sense" overhaul where the devs actually sort out the numerical, mechanic side of the game, to make it feel satisfying and rewarding. But for now, what we're left it is a big facade with little substance that is best played as a hardcore permadeath Zombie killing game, with a large map.
• Not recommended Posted December 21, 2025 on Steam First of all, if you have never played this game, it is one of the best zombie survival and you should try it. I have played PZ since it's release, I have close to 3000 hours in the game but most of that time isn't recorded on steam. It's a fun game and you should try it. But I'm still going to leave a negative review. Why? Let's delve in. This game has been in Early access for over 12 years, the devs have made millions in sales, that in itself is not a problem as long as the game is being actively worked on but the development pace has slowed to a crawl and at the rate it's going it's unlikely the game will EVER be feature complete. The devs have lost the passion they had when they started the project and it's very obvious they are barely working on it anymore. This how PZ update history looks like. 2013: Release 2014: Builds 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30 2015: 31, 32, 33 2016: 34, 35 2017: 36, 37, 38 2018: 39, 40 2019: Nothing 2020: Nothing 2021: 41 2022: Nothing 2023: Nothing 2024: 42 2025: Nothing 2026: 99.9% chances of nothing since they spent the last year fixing multiplayer and just release the fix. I think you can see the issue. 11 years ago they were communicating about how they were making great progress on NPCS. Just read this post from 2014 while knowing this feature is far from being in the game in 2025: https://projectzomboid.com/blog/news/2014/07/its-an-npc-related-mondoid1-no-hype-pls/ The game is not yet abandoned but if this trend continue, it will soon be. On top of that the latest decisions are very questionable. Nerfs, Nerfs, Nerfs, tedious mechanic, nerf, nerf. They heavily nerfed the traits you get when creating a character because people figured the meta. Instead of buffing the traits that were not picked they just made all the meta pick irrelevant. That has made it so if you want to be a person that has a job you need to be half blind, prone to illness, a slow healer, overweight, and if you go in a moving car it will give you fever and you'll die. They brought jobs such as Knapping, glassmaking or pottery which add very little but tedium and I'm pretty sure nobody asked. This is the kind of content you expect of a mod or something you would do once the game is feature complete. The scope creep is unbelievable while important game systems get ignored. Unpaid modders are doing more for this game than actual developers. Moders fixed the broken multiplayer before they did, they created NPCs before they did, they implemented archery before they did and so on... When people are rightly calling them on it they throw a tantrum and refuse to take accountability. A dev even insulted the player base on twitter and told people to off themselves. They will say the updates are long because they don't want to release bugged content but then will still release bugged content and shield themselves behind the early access tag. Multiplayer broke it took them over a year to fix it (allegedly so there is no/little bugs on release) and it is full of game breaking bugs. The fanatical fanbase is not helping either anybody pointing any issue will be dogpiled. I have seen bug reports get downvoted into oblivion on reddit with people chain replying "ItS EaRlY aCcEsS" like mindless drones. Here's an example of an upvoted comment on a bug report thread: "Honestly we really just need to make fun of people who complain about the release schedule and unstable builds.". With a community that can't see the problems there is very little hope for positive change. I have lost any hope this game will ever be feature complete and I simply cannot recommend giving these lazy people any more money until they finish what they started. I will update my review if things improve but so far it has only gotten worse and worse. Last update b42 has killed any interest I had in the game because it's just a more tedious version of b41 (I like that they added basements and expanded the map, the rest is a downgrade). At this point it's not even about money, it's just infuriating to see people with a gem doing nothing with it. I wish they would just sell the IP to a studio that is interested in actually making the game the best version it could be. Not a bunch of people struggling to find the motivation to work on their game for an hour or two per week (if that).
• Recommended Posted January 4, 2026 on Steam Cool zombie game. Might need to sink in a couple more hours to get the grasp of it. Edit cause reddit: Yes, I quit the game when Im done playing. No, these aren't 'farmed' hours! Cheers and happy zomboiding.