A DayZ by any other name...

Zombie games have taken all shapes and sizes over the years, from Wii-based Evil Dead-style games within the Resident Evil universe (Umbrella Chronicles) to frantic rooftop gunfights in the Left 4 Dead series. They all bring in the element of isolation into the mix, surrounded by crumbling cities and smoking ruins, but they just manage to miss that feeling of desperation - you die, and then you respawn or reload, not that far back.

Enter DayZ (pronounced day-zed, or day-zee depending on your horoscope and the phases of Jupiter’s moons) – a zombie survival simulator. Firstly, a little bit of background. DayZ is a mod for Armed Assault 2 (ArmA 2), a military combat simulator. The base game, developed by Bohemia Interactive, is massive – hundreds of realistically modelled weapons and vehicles, along with bullet physics and wind directions – and has been quite popular within the mil-sim community, since its release back in 2009. One of Bohemia’s developers started making DayZ for fun, and it quickly went viral, pushing the lacklustre Steam sales of ArmA 2 to the top of the charts for months (quite a feat for a 3-year old niche game) during spring/summer 2012.

So, the game. You (and up to 39 other players, depending on the server size) are stranded in 225km2 of pseudo-Russian countryside. You can go anywhere and do anything. There are stories of kidnappings, urban legends and large clan-battles in the larger cities. As a fresh-spawn, you start with some odds and ends, including a torch, a bandage and a box of painkilers (earlier versions of the mod had you spawn with a pistol) and that’s it. You have to scavenge the rest of your equipment, but the problem is that the best loot is found in the more once-populated areas of Chernarus. Or other player’s bodies. The closer you get to a built-up area, the more zombies spawn around you. “Fine” you might say, “I’ll just shoot them all and if I run out of ammo, I’ll just run away”. Good luck with that, little Timmy. The predators of Chernarus are not your jovial, slow-moving zombies; they are the 28 Xs Later (where X is a unit of time) style of zombie that will run at you, zig-zagging like a ziggy-zaggy thing. Zombies are attracted by noise, so by the time you’ve killed your groupies, the next lot is on the horizon, running straight for you. When you die, you respawn along the south, or south-east coastline, back with the original starting equipment. Death is meaningful. This isn’t a game you can win. The aim is to live as long as possible.

The base game is buggy, with zombies being able to walk and melee through concrete walls. Lying down on the ground can break your legs, and lag issues can cause you to go flying. As such, a standalone version of DayZ, has started development, which will hopefully remove the majority of engine problems and other game-play issues such as people alt-F4-ing in the middle of a firefight, as to not die. Douchenozzles.

Some people don’t like the countryside – maybe it’s the parachuting cows, or the rocks that look like people. Maybe they have allergies. Those people have been working on more maps for DayZ, and have brought us the bottle-necked-by-bridges island of Lingor, and the city of Fallujah. That’s right – instead of rolling hills and 30-minute runs between villages, the whole map is a massive city, with loot and zombie spawns all over the place (it’s not too kind on your computer though, if you like things looking pretty).

Now, in all the lives I’ve had, it’s not been the bugs that have killed me the most, nor the zombies. It’s everyone else trying to survive, who thinks that it’s a good idea to shoot an unarmed freshly-spawned player. But then, that’s simple humanity for you - kill all your competitors, no matter the challenge. I’m not bitter at all.

Being a survival game, its not just bullets and teeth that can mess up your murder-streak (your HUD shows zombie kills, PC kills a.k.a. murders, temperature, number of zombies on the server, etc) but you also have to worry about hunger (assuaged by cans of beans or pasta), thirst, bone breakages, blood loss and a bad case of the sniffles (no, really. Let your temperature drop too low for too long, and you’ll catch an nasty infection). Team-work is the name of the game – your limited inventory allows for little hoarding, so making camp sites with tents, and spreading the work load over multiple servers can make your life easier, especially when it comes to finding parts to repair your helicopters and ATVs. Trusting your group to shoot the hostile PCs and zombies, rather than yourself is quite a hurdle (especially with no easy way to recognise a player), and is one of the reasons I love DayZ. It’s actually a game where I fear dying.

I truly love the slow approach that you can take to the game running and gunning results in premature deathulation and the patient, slow and steady route gets you the best loot and gives you the best chances. Keeping quiet and out of the way is often the wisest tactic.

The bean wars have been long and painful, but remember that your enemies may take our brains, but they’ll never take our FREEDOM!