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It’s one of those games I’ll drop for six months… then get hopelessly addicted to for another six, only to quit again. Rinse and repeat.

Released back in 2013, it somehow still holds up against its competitors. This is the ultimate zombie survival game.

The game does not hold your hand—at all. For the first 12 hours, you’ll play like an idiot, trying to figure out how anything works. You’ll die repeatedly: hunger, thirst, zombies. Eventually, after painfully decoding Russian signs and finally figuring out where the hell you are, it happens.

A sudden black screen.
A delayed gunshot.
“You are dead.”

A player sniped you from afar.

Now you’re back on the shore. Back to nothing.

You meet someone. They talk to you, show you the ropes. You head inland together and run into a pack of wolves. Somehow, you survive. You camp for the night. The next day, you hit a military base and have the time of your life—until distant gunshots echo across the map.

“Let’s go check it out,” your new buddy says.

After 15 minutes of walking, you spot four fully geared players building a base inside a warehouse in town. You and your friend make a plan and wait them out. An hour passes. They leave.

You move in.

You start raiding the base, hacking through the wooden door they built. Midway through, the owners return. Gunfire erupts. Your friend drops—dead. You dive for cover, exchanging shots, moving left and right, adrenaline pumping. You manage to kill one of them.

Then—boom.

“You are dead.”

Back on the shore. Back to zero.

You sit there for a moment… then say to yourself:

LET’S DO IT AGAIN.

A game unlike any other. I have invested ridiculous amounts of time into this beautiful creation... Aside from a few annoying bugs DAYZ is a one of a kind zombie, pvp, pve, massive multiplayer online,. fps, game. Warning to all players that if you try this game and like it I promise you will put tons of time into it so beware!

Overall, playing this game feels less like a difficult-but-rewarding “hardcore” video game and more like working a full-time job (with overtime, and without the pay). It’s mostly tedious and boring for no reason, and it also doesn’t feel like a true hardcore game (it feels more gamified). However, it’s undoubtedly unmatched when it comes to pvp, but you’ll rarely get a taste of it until you’re several hundred hours in.

The new player experience is probably more punishing than it used to be a few years ago. It’ll likely take a beginner 10–20 hours just to learn the basics: conserving food and water, avoiding freezing, building survival tools, and identifying which places to loot. You can add an extra five hours to hit the RNG required to make it off the coast with enough loot to find your friends. Add another five hours if you are new and not using a third-party digital map, or if you don’t know the Cyrillic alphabet. While I can read, write, and speak it, it becomes a massive pain (and lots of confusion or miscommunication) when a group member cannot, even if they are familiar with the map layout. In other words, you’ll need to spend significant time investment outside of the video game (wikis, YouTube, tutorials, forums, discord, friends)… BEFORE you pick up the video game.

Once you survive the coast, the vehicle mechanics become the next nightmare. The millisecond you get into a drivers seat, there’s a 50% chance the car will rock violently like it’s a pontoon in a hurricane. If this happens, you and the car will take damage if you don’t jump out immediately. However, jumping out often results in injury or “falling” through the map (i think i almost got killed a few times). The worst part is that this desync is client-side; your friends will see your car sitting still while you appear prone on the ground, unable to move. It’s both annoying and dangerous… if bandits are nearby, they’ll just shoot you because they can see you normally, while you have zero ability to fight or maneuver since you’re meshed underground. This is common.

Furthermore, vehicles don’t even need a driver for the physics to fail completely. I’ve experienced ghost touches just from standing several meters from a vehicle, causing it to spontaneously bounce into the air, flip several times, slide sideways for 50 meters, and then boomerang back to kill me or my friends. It’s happened twice in my 552 hours of gameplay (although tbf it only seemed to happen on xbox, which is where the bulk of my time was spent in game, at 465hr).

Driving at high speeds is even worse. There’s a 90% chance you’ll have a Back to the Future moment where the game either crashes or skips five seconds of frames, all while locking your throttle at max. If you’re lucky, the game might unfreeze just in time for you to manage a stalling engine while barreling at 130kph toward a city with unrendered assets. You simply have to hope you don’t drive over a pebble and fly into space or ram into an invisible, unrendered concrete barrier. This is common.

Survival rates in these crashes are next to nonexistent, and it’ll take a minimum of 20–40 minutes to return to your body, even with intimate knowledge of the map. By the time you return, your car will likely be sitting on cinderblocks with every part stripped. The only remains of your body will be butchered human steaks, intestines, and fat (all cut up by toxic players who either heard the crash or shot you while you were unconscious, and just wanted all your gear to despawn).

Regardless of your isolation, preparedness, or caution, you’ll lose countless hours of work in a 5sec to 5min firefight or an offline raid if you don’t correctly store loot in buried barrels/chests scattered around the middle of nowhere. Base building exists, but it’s pointless; bases take countless hours to build but can be torn down by sledgehammers in mere minutes.

The community has also become incredibly toxic over the years, with many players gladly using exploits or blatant cheating to grief others. It’s mostly teenagers and university students with nothing better to do, just trolling for amusement. Meanwhile, the game remains riddled with bugs and janky controls, getting worse over time. It doesn’t help that the developers hardly do anything aside from releasing new $20–$30 DLC maps, assets, and content nobody asked for.

I strongly dislike hand-holding in video games and prefer gritty, brutal experiences. However, DayZ has taken realism so far that there’s no real gameplay or enjoyment left. Out of my 552 hours of playtime, I’m fairly certain that much less than 1% of it was spent in combat.

To be fair, specifically on PC, the combat is extremely fun if you actually have the gear for it. I’ll just give an example of one of the best combat experiences I’ve had. I was at an infamous pvp area during nighttime (авиабаза Выбор, aka Vybor Airfield). I had my VSD with a standard PSO scope and my night vision on, crouched near some piping on a tall, elevated industrial building. I saw a trio on the opposite side of the runway and dropped one guy immediately. Once I confirmed the kill, one of the others saw my muzzle flash and landed a bad hit on my helmet (I was lucky, though my night vision got ruined!). I retreated and waited inside a utility room with a tall ladder. He quietly breached the door; we mag-dumped each other, and he knocked me out (but he thought I was dead). I woke up while he was looting me and unloaded a whole mag into his head. My health and blood were blinking near zero, but somehow I stabilized long enough for a blood transfusion and bandaging. His friend rushed in too late (after I was already done healing) and panicked, making him an easy 3-tap kill. I had to limp out of the base… but I survived! If you know the feeling, you just know. It’s definitely a 10/10 combat experience, and no other game comes close. But those moments are just so scarce. There’s not much else going on in the game besides going to the same house every few hours because you know there’s a high chance of finding canned beans.

I don’t have a problem with the hunger/thirst mechanics, but the game seems overly focused on just that. The developers might as well add a nutrient and vitamin overhaul, forcing players to write grocery lists and hunt for specific foods that only spawn in specific building models. Because yes, building assets have hard-coded RNG that differs from asset to asset… how “realistic” and “hardcore” is that? For example, despite being classified as “residential” buildings, the piano houses have different RNG than a specific model of blue house, a specific apartment model, or a specific cabin model. If you know the exact models, you know the RNG tables and just wait for the loot cycles.

I genuinely regret buying this game several years ago (and doing so twice 😢), even with them being discounted at a low sale price. I think sitting in a padded cell wearing a straight jacket for those wasted 552 hours would’ve been healthier than the marathon i spent playing this game. My lifespan has likely been shortened by 1–2 years just from the constant low-level stress and awareness this game requires to keep you alive.

For anyone considering DayZ as a new player: don’t. The game is heavily romanticized. In reality, you’ll mostly encounter players with hundreds or thousands of hours who know how to game the system. You probably want realism and survival mechanics, but DayZ eventually boils down to loopholes, metas, and exploiting RNG. Success requires knowledge of spawn timers, gaming specific building loot drops, loot cycling, and exploiting buried stash persistence (or using multiple accounts to carry storage and guarantee loot safety). On top of that, you must learn to work around frequent crashes and bad physics just to survive the game engine itself. It’s fine for DayZ veterans, but i think new people should be wary of what the game is really like and not romanticize it.