The Day Before is officially the worst game I’ve ever played

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SHOULD I PLAY THE DAY BEFORE?

Please skip this game. Don’t hurt yourself like this. The Day Before offers nothing but painful technical issues, boring extraction shooter gameplay, unpolished visuals, and a series of other problems that make this game not even worth considering.

TIME PLAYED

I played The Day Before for two and a half hours. I completed the first chapter and a few missions, but due to incredibly bad technical issues, I could not continue playing. The problems in The Day Before made this entire experience feel extremely frustrating and even confusing at times. Due to all the technical issues, I probably wasted thirty percent of that time just getting the game to work.

WHAT’S AWESOME ABOUT THE DAY BEFORE?

• Nothing. I’ve played dozens of games for TapTap over the past couple years, but I’ve never encountered a situation like The Day Before—a game where I literally have nothing good to say. This title has been designed as essentially an Escape from Tarkov clone, except it’s an extremely poorly made clone. It’s not worth the forty bucks; not worth the time I spent getting it to work and playing it; and not worth the mental capacity to digest the horrible gameplay.

WHAT NEEDS IMPROVEMENT IN THE DAY BEFORE?

• Connection issues. Playing The Day Before has been one of the most painful experiences I’ve had with a game in my entire life. Connecting to the server and loading into the game or an environment takes freakin’ forever—and the game constantly lags. I could not walk two seconds in a straight line without my screen stuttering like I was trying to run Cyberpunk 2077 on the highest settings. But this game is no Cyberpunk, and I was even playing on the lowest settings!

• Crashing and glitching. Although I haven’t personally experienced this, thousands of other players have reported major crashes and other glitches on Steam. Reported problems include falling through the floor and instantly dying, getting stuck inside walls or boxes, and getting shot down by other players who are camped inside objects. Every player seems to be finding their own unique problems with this cursed game.

• It’s not open-world. Given how the game was marketed before release, I went into The Day Before expecting an open-world survival game. When I found out that it was just a terrible clone of Escape from Tarkov, I was pretty disappointed. The Steam description for the game still calls it an “open-world MMO,” but that’s a lie. It’s actually an extraction shooter with some slightly big areas. The advertising for the game makes it seem like it’s more than that, which is even more disappointing. If the fifteen thousand negative reviews for the game on Steam are anything to go by, I wasn’t the only one who was frustrated by this bait-and-switch sales tactic.

• No survivors. Alongside the lack of an open world, one of my biggest disappointments with The Day Before was how empty the world is. Even with the servers apparently overloaded, I rarely ran into other players. In fact, I barely even saw any zombies. I ran into less than a dozen undead monsters during my time in the game, which seems pretty unusual for a post-apocalyptic game that’s supposedly about a world being overrun by zombies.

• Customization. There weren’t many options to customize my survivor’s appearance in The Day Before, and I couldn’t even rotate the model during character creation. How the hell did they expect me to pick a hairstyle without being able to see the back of my character’s head? That’s textbook stuff! The actual character design feels just as low-effort and unpolished as the user interface too.

• Character animation. Speaking to characters in The Day Before always creeped me out. NPCs stare straight into the player character’s eyes while talking, and their lip movement never matches their words. It’s both incredibly awkward and arguably the only thing in the game that’s actually scary.

• No melee weapons. The fact that there aren’t any melee weapons in The Day Before—which I repeat is a zombie game—floors me. Every time zombies got near to me, I had to either run away or run in circles until I found a good line of fire. Having no good options for close-range combat in a zombie game is just baffling.

• You cannot jump over a lot of things. I don’t understand why the developers added a jump feature, but you can’t even vault over the smallest things, like barricades or car hoods. What’s the point of the mechanic if it’s not even going to be useful half the time?

• You cannot enter most of the buildings on the map. For a self-proclaimed open-world game, it sucks that I couldn’t go into over seventy percent of the buildings in The Day Before. On most missions, I was left either wandering the streets looking for loot or scavenging through broken-down cars in parking lots. I wish I could’ve explored some of the high-rise buildings or houses in rural neighborhoods, but that’s not possible here.

• Looting animation is so, so slow. Every time I grabbed loot out of a container or from a dead enemy, it took ages. Because the animation took so long, I was left in danger for roughly five seconds any time I wanted to scavenge items. Game design choices like this can be on purpose, to increase tension or make it feel like a risk-reward trade-off, but I never felt like that was the case with The Day Before. Like pretty much everything else in this game, it just felt like a choice that had been implemented without any thought.

• Zombies are really tanky but give little loot. It takes around three to four headshots to kill a zombie, which feels absurd compared to most games of this type. I wouldn’t mind so much if killing zombies came with a benefit, but they don’t drop much loot—and sometimes they don’t drop anything at all.

• It’s probably never getting updated, if it stays online at all. Well, if the rest of these issues haven’t stopped you from trying out The Day Before, wait till you find out that the developer who made it is shutting down. Yes, the studio behind the game that falsely advertised itself as an “open-world MMO” and got allegedly over two-hundred-thousand people to spend their money is closing down just four days after the game's launch. According to developers Fntastic, “The Day Before has failed financially” and they “lack funds to continue” the game. They claim servers will stay online for now but that the future of the game "is unknown." Now that’s a bit sus, isn’t it?

PLATFORM TESTED

PC via Steam

[Review written by TapTap editor Jay Hunter.]

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