9.2 hours played
Written 30 days ago
Reviews that compare this game to Project Zomboid are doing this game a massive disservice, the two games have different intentions behind their designs and after going through developer replies they themselves will frequently state that this game is not Project Zomboid and is not trying to be. Project Zomboid focuses more on the survival, stealth, and horror aspects of the zombie apocalypse, while HumanitZ looks to be focusing more on action based combat with things like horde attacks on your base every day.
This isn't to say that one style of game is better than the other, they're just different. If you're looking for a pizza and someone recommends you a burger saying it's just like pizza you're still going to look at them funny no matter how good that burger is.
If you're looking to play an action game with zombies, then HumanitZ isn't that bad. I had some fun running around as Mr Clean popping off zombie heads. If you're looking for a zombie survival game, I wouldn't recommend buying the game until the developers release their 1. update that is promising to overhaul the skills, professions, and do things like mark roads on the in-game map as there are currently several roads and areas which are not on it. Even then, I'm hesitant about the game's future as a zombie survival game because PvPvE games often tend to balance around the PvP while the PvE falls behind.
In its current state the game feels like it is having an identity crisis with whether it is trying to be an action arcade game, a PvPvE experience similar to Rust, or a zombie survival game. The survival and resource scarcity typical of a zombie survival game suffers from the fact that hordes are guaranteed to spawn on you forcing you into massive battles on the regular.
The action and combat of the game wouldn't feel so painful if it wasn't for the way loot is handled in this game. Everything, from items you find to what drops from an enemy, is RNG. This includes raiders who have a near endless supply of ammo, advanced tactical gear, machetes, rifles, and so on who will rarely drop a handful of bullets, a broken shotgun, and practically zero medical supplies from my experience. Killing a raider wielding a machete then having them not drop it felt like I was playing an mmo with loot tables, not a zombie survival.
While there are plenty of weapons available, the gameplay is often limited primarily by healing items as a bleeding wound won't recover on its own and is a death sentence if you have no bandages on you. If even 10% of zombies killed would drop the bloodied clothes item that can be torn into 1-2 rags then it would be a massive improvement to the feeling of combat in game.
Once you run out of ammo and start to go into melee you'll start to see that some zombies don't get staggered by your hits and will trade smacks with you, using the chainsaw to go into combat is the worst example of this as it's so slow it's completely pointless to use for anything but logging. There's also bloated green gas zombies who have no blood spray, hit marker, sound, or any kind of notification for a successful shot on them.
Outside of personal preferences, there are a few mechanics that leave me only able to play this game for short periods at a time with friends before it becomes too bothersome to continue.
Finishers feel completely pointless with their current cost of 50 stamina while requiring you to have at least 50 stamina. If you have a decent melee weapon you can usually kill a zombie in 3-4 swings which will cost you around 7 stamina per swing. By staggering your swings out, you can recover your stamina at the same time, so you're roughly killing one zombie with 20-30 stamina. It's not even safer to do the finishers instead of melee attacking, as you can easily avoid the majority of zombie attacks by backpedalling while swinging in melee.
When using hotkeys to swap weapons that can both be placed on your back, it replaces the item in your hand with the hotkey you hit. So for example if you have your gun bound to '1' and your melee weapon bound to '2', when you have your gun out and swap to your melee weapon it will then put your gun in '2'. This can lead to you hitting '1' repeatedly when trying to take your gun back out, except your gun is no longer in that slot all that's there is your empty hands. Sometimes that will cause you to put your weapon away standing there with your bare fists, but the responsiveness of weapon switching is often so janky that you won't even switch weapons anyways unless you hit the key repeatedly.
Cars handle strangely, it's like someone shaved down the tread on all the tires so when you're making turns you'll feel like you're driving on ice.
Water coolers (which are called water machines in this game) all contain dirty water. It feels incredibly out of place, and it doesn't seem like it's supposed to represent water degrading as you can still find fresh bottles of soda which would without fail start to go off before a bottle of water does.
Zombies and raiders can attack you through your car. Raiders being able to shoot you isn't too strange, though it gets annoying when they spawn behind your car and start unloading into the back of your head. The zombies being able to attack you through the car is the worst of it though. Crawling zombies can get you, dog zombies can chomp you with a guaranteed bleed (hope you have bandages), and the worst experience I had with it was when I was 2 HP and able to escape from a horde in a vehicle. I was zooming through the streets, barely controlling that car, only to pass within a few feet of an orange blister-covered zombie who was so smelly that merely passing by him at 50mph made Mr Clean instantly vomit his intestines out into his bandana and die.
When chopping down trees, you'll have to pick up each and every piece of wood and stick individually. Which doesn't sound bad, until you see you have to do the 'bend over and pick up' animation for every single item. On top of that, sometimes the 'F' key to pick up items would stop working until I moved a single step in any direction, despite the item being highlighted.
Rotten food and normal food don't have different names when on the ground
The SATNAV in vehicles will rotate its map in the direction your car is facing, which makes it pretty annoying to try and keep yourself moving in one heading while you're navigating through any areas that require frequent turns. Giving an option to turn off the rotating would make it a lot easier to navigate.
More than a few buildings aren't able to be explored at all, I get that not every single place can have an exploreable interior but things like the 2nd floor of a motel being completely boarded up while the first floor of the motel is almost entirely copy-pasted interior rooms felt more like a game trying to save time on a location rather than a survival situation. I saw that the developers have a new hidden island in their roadmap as a development goal, and I hope they're going to finish building the initial game map first before they start on that project.
The quest system feels like it was something that was just somewhat slapped onto the game? There's no feedback when you complete the first major quest which is to repair a radio tower. It just...turns on the radio and leaves the quest in your objectives list with no update to it. There's no checkmark next to the objective requirement of turning on the radio tower, or movement of the quest to the completed quest tab (why even have a completed quest tab if the completed quest doesn't go there?). What I thought would feel like a first major accomplishment in the game as a group was instead just sort of a "Did we do it? Is it on? I don't see anything." situation.
I'll probably still play the game in short bursts for the near future, but the lifespan of the game to me is limited by strange design choices and game bugs stacking up.