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When I closed my eyes and imagined controls that weren’t a trainwreck, I found myself pulled in by the idea that almost everything in the world can be broken down and used to craft something else, and the approach encourages a great deal of experimentation that's appropriate for a setting focused on working with what you have. To be clear, there's a decent game under all of this cruft that PC players have enjoyed for years, it’s just that that average-at-best game has been completely crippled by a bad console port. It's the kind of thing you'd expect to find on a PC game on Steam's Early Access. I got the most fun out of 7 Days to Die, I think, just from guessing when the next glitch would pop up. All the while the framerates collapse and rise again, zombie-like, the action freezes completely during the most mundane tasks, and the multiplayer maps sometimes shut down entirely without warning. Some of the maps, particularly those in the randomized worlds, look like rough drafts that accidentally made it from a developer's trash folder and into the final release. Fog obscures distances everywhere, limiting views to a few hundred yards at best. There are places, such as the desert's expanses of yucca and prickly pear, where 7 Days to Die achieves a degree of realistic detail, but on the whole the world that unfolds on the Xbox One looks ancient and unappealing. “Perhaps I would have enjoyed myself more if the world still had some beauty to counterbalance its sorrows.
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