I’ve recently taken the plunge in playing Rebirth (v1.1 b14), a total overhaul mod for 7 Days to Die. There are a number of such overhaul mods out there, including Darkness Falls, Afterlife, Undead Legacy, and more. I’ve only played Darkness Falls before this, aside of course vanilla for a few hundred hours.

Verdict: it’s got some great concepts, but… there’s some foundational concerns.

One of the biggest draws to Rebirth is the companion system. You start out with a dog companion that both warns about and fights enemies. You can eventually expand your fighting group with more dogs (or other beasts), NPCs, and temporary help. This does a lot to make the game feel less lonely in single player, and the companions are actually very handy in a fight. And don’t worry: if the dog dies, it just respawns back at your bed.

Another of the “draws” is a return of Learn By Doing and overall reimagining (and slowing) of progression in general. While there is character XP in the game, it does nothing by itself. Instead, to progress your character – including in one of 10 classes! – you need to use specific weapons, gaining extra progress for headshots. By itself, the system is OK for what it is, and you certainly have more opportunity for progression as zombie density has skyrocketed.

The problem is that the mod’s difficulty progression is also tied to zombie kills. Once you hit certain thresholds, zombies have a chance to spawn with random buffs, including a RNG roll to revive in a stronger state. This “works” on a conceptual level, but it feels bad in practice. The name of the game is still scavenging, so while killing a huge wandering horde might give you +2.5% weapon speed or whatever your class does, it makes getting food, crafting components, and everything else actually meaningful harder.

I want to really reemphasize how badly you are punished for killing zombies here. You slowly level your primary Attributes by performing certain tasks, and there are specific Perks that you can then put points in once you hit certain thresholds. For example, you need Dexterity 1 in order to put a point into Cardio. How do you get points for Cardio? You buy them from a vendor for cash. How do you get cash? Scavenging, primarily. You can get some from Questing, but keep in mind Questing gives a lot of XP which then levels you and makes the game harder. If that is the mod author’s intention – to discourage the chain-questing that is (still) meta in vanilla – it should be more explicit, IMO.

The overall increased difficulty is another “draw” but similarly falls flat. The mod is hard, but difficulty in practically all 7 Days to Die iterations is predicated on HP sponges and/or ridiculous mob counts. Rebirth has both. Once you hit a certain level threshold, periodically a boss zombie will spawn in your immediate location along with ~30 of their best friends. For the most part, especially early, you will just die and drop all your stuff. But, hey, don’t worry, the boss and mobs will still be there waiting for you! If you somehow whittle down the horde with your non-existent bullets and take down the 6000+ HP boss, you get a loot chest that will give you maybe 15% progression towards one Attribute point. Yay! Also, get used to this shit, as to unlock certain crafting tables you have to purchase quests from a vendor that spawns these types of hordes. I’m not sure if the intention is to build a nearby cheese base or just kite them around for hours or what.

By the way, you still have to contend with the 7 day hordes on default settings.

I suppose that is worth mentioning as a positive to Rebirth: the large amount of settings you can tweak. Turning off Horde Night is one first things I did, once I realized that I was still struggling to stay hydrated on Day 6, let alone figuring out how I would ever survive the night. There may be other knobs that can be turned to address a few of the other complaints I already voiced, including turning them off. On the other hand, most people are likely to roll into Rebirth under default settings and get run over, so… yeah.

If you have squeezed all the fun out of vanilla 7 Days to Die and are looking for more, I recommend… Darkness Falls. Although I haven’t played it lately, it had a completely new look and feel with increased difficulty that, at the same time, did not feel punishing. Sure, you could encounter a few high-level zeds outside normal progression, but that is the spice of life. Combined with the extra tiers, it felt like 7D2D++ rather than a whole new game. Rebirth has some neat concepts I would like expanded on (companion system, bandits), but it feels more like a punishment simulator than anything else. As a player, I should never feel like I have to metagame killing less zombies in a zombie-killing game.

[Fake Edit] Since my primary character is already screwed, I started a second character and revamped a lot of the settings. For example, I turned Character XP down to 75% considering levels only serve to punish you. Conversely, I turned Class XP levels to 150% to improve the speed of getting abilities and such. Between those settings and a better understanding of the mod’s flow, I have had a somewhat better experience.

However. It’s still not that good, honestly. I’m going to give it a bit more time to cook to see if things improve once I progress a bit further, but it kind of feels like a slog still. And not in a “sense of pride and accomplishment” way, but more in a “nothing feels rewarding and I’m punished for playing the game.”