The short answer: it reviews considerably better now than it did in early access, and the gap between those two reputations is the most useful thing to understand before buying. This page is not our review — it is an assembly of the scores, the reversal, and the complaints that survived it.
Critic scores
Metacritic's PC Metascore is 77, "Generally Favorable", based on 4 critic reviews. The platform qualifier matters: the page also displays aggregates for other platforms based on different review counts, and lists nine reviews in total because four scoreless early-access reviews from 2024 are included without counting toward the score. Any page quoting "77 based on 8 reviews" has crossed two different numbers.
The user score sits at 7.1, "Mixed or Average", from 13 user ratings — 8 positive, 2 mixed, 3 negative.
The scored 1.0-era reviews:
| Outlet | Score | Date | Argument |
|---|---|---|---|
| Xbox Tavern | 90 | 19 Aug | Objective play is excellent, up to eight players, Survival is a good change of pace, and the constant risk of losing it all feels well balanced — conditional on the buggy menus being fixed |
| Insider Gaming | 80 | 10 Aug | A model example of graduating from early access |
| GameSpot | 80 | 21 Aug | State of Decay's life-and-death pressure inside a Left 4 Dead-style co-op structure; marked down for subpar shooting mechanics |
| CGMagazine | 75 | 10 Aug | Keyboard and mouse is good, controller is bad |
| SECTOR.sk | 70 | 10 Aug | Still enjoyable, but the combat system and visuals could have been better |
The reversal is the story
In 2024, during early access, both IGN and GamingBolt scored the game 50. IGN's complaint was a mountain of serious bugs; GamingBolt's was that the game was squandered by bugs, a dismal gameplay loop and an awful permadeath implementation. Eurogamer was the outlier at the time, saying it was slightly baffled by the drubbing and rating it the most replayable zombie game since the first Dying Light.
Going from a pair of 50s to a 77 is a genuine turnaround, not a rounding error. If your impression of this game was formed in 2024, it is out of date.
What players say now
Steam sentiment as measured on 25 August 2026:
- Recent (30 days): Mostly Positive — 3,385 reviews, 72% positive
- All English reviews: Mixed — 7,907 reviews, 69% positive
Those numbers move fast; they gained roughly 700 recent and 520 overall reviews in the three days before that reading, so treat any undated figure with suspicion, including in three days' time.
On the raw scale of the thing, the studio reports over 1 million players, 500,000 of whom arrived after 1.0.
The praise
An independent review video with 201,000 views summarises the positive case as atmosphere — lighting, fog, dark interiors — plus sound design where infection actually affects what you hear, co-op tension, and permadeath giving extraction genuine stakes.
The criticism
The same video's negatives are repetitive objectives — repeated hold-to-interact bars, repeatedly fetching the same kinds of items — and inconsistent melee where hits do not land and zombies do not react.
That melee complaint is the one to take seriously, because three independent sources converge on it: SECTOR.sk's "combat could have been better", the review video's "inconsistent melee", and a long-form player feedback post.
One player with over 150 hours categorised recent Steam negative reviews and got this distribution: zombie AI and spawning 32.7%, progression and permadeath 24.7%, repetitive content 24.7%, melee 22.7%, identity versus the original 22.7%, balance and difficulty 19.7%, bugs and softlocks 17.7%, matchmaking and connection 15.0%, performance and crashes 12.7%, UI and inventory 12.3%. That classification was done by the player using AI, and they stated themselves that it is not a scientific sample. Read it as a rough shape, not data.
So is it worth it in 2026?
Buy it if you want a co-op zombie game where death carries weight and a squad has to coordinate rather than four people spraying in the same direction. The atmosphere and the permadeath stakes are what everyone who likes it points at.
Hold off if you play mostly on controller — that is the one weakness with press confirmation and an official fix still pending — or if repetitive objectives are a dealbreaker for you, because that criticism recurs across every source above.