The saga of The Day Before has been quite a wild and winding tale. One, it seems, without a happy ending. Originally revealed back in 2021, developer Fntastic promised an ambitious open-world looter-shooter zombie MMO along the lines of something like The Division and impressive early “gameplay” trailers earned the project a large following on Steam. Then the delays came, with Fntastic sometimes offering odd excuses for why the game had to be pushed back, including unexplained trademark issues (an explanation they later walked back). Fans also began to pick apart the gameplay showcases we’d seen, accusing them of being mere mockups and not representative of an actual game.
Well, as of yesterday, The Day Before is now available via Steam Early Access, so it is a real game… it’s just not the game that Fntastic promised. The game isn’t really an MMO, but rather, a much smaller-scale extraction shooter. The game is also riddled with bugs, uses tons of pre-bought assets, and, of course, the servers are a mess, meaning many can’t play even if they wanted to.
All these issues have resulted in an Overwhelmingly Negative user review score on Steam, with only 16 percent of reviews being positive as of this writing. That isn’t the very lowest score on Steam, but it’s still pretty rough considering the excitement that once surrounded this project. Steam user Biffa provides some handy bullet points, that seem to reflect what most of the Steam reviewers are saying…
- No open-world survival elements, it’s just an extraction shooter, and a bad one at that.
- Combat is terrible, I went into a ‘raid’ and fought a player, it was laggy and completely unsatisfying. The zombies are dumb as bricks, stand on a car and you are invincible.
- There is no reason to even progress in the game from what I can tell, it lacks the hook that other games in the genre have like Tarkov. There are no satisfying differences with gun customization and every gun feels the same. Loot seems pretty easy to get too, for instance I found two military guns within 5 mins.
- Everything is slow. Looting is slow. The intro is purposely slow. It really feels like they try to make you waste as much time as possible so you don’t hit the 2 hour refund.
- The game is bugged. You can hide in objects with no hit box, you can fall through the floor, you can get soft-locked and completely break your character VERY EASILY.
- Frequent crashes. Also, good luck getting into a server if you run into one of the many game breaking issues, because you can’t. Who could have predicted this?
Of course, The Day Before is still in Early Access, so there’s always the chance the game improves. It will probably never be the MMO originally promised, but maybe it has a chance at becoming an okay extraction shooter? Maybe?
The Day Before is available now on Steam. Has anyone given the game a try? What are your thoughts?
