The Day Before Steam reviews are scathing, blunt, and enough to condemn the Fntastic zombie game – which was billed as an MMO, but plays more like an extraction shooter – to the all-time bottom ten on Valve’s storefront. After launching into early access on Thursday, December 7, following a lengthy hype period that catapulted The Day Before to number two on the Steam wishlist chart, Fntastic’s proposed sandbox survival sim now bears an ‘overwhelmingly negative’ rating, as players criticize everything from inaccessible servers, buggy maps, lack of other players and enemies, and a broken inventory system. The Day Before Discord server was previously locked down as bug reports and feedback flooded in. Now, Fntastic shares a new statement, describe the early access release as “quite challenging.”
Originally pitched as an MMO, wherein players would cooperate – or compete – to navigate an apocalyptic world inhabited by zombies, The Day Before in fact functions more like an extraction shooter, wherein you enter a restricted environment, obtain whatever you can, and then return to a hub world. Glitches, server problems, and a significant disparity between what was shown in trailers versus the quality of the early access version, have catalyzed a large amount of negative user reviews, plunging the zombie game into the depths of Steam’s catalogue.
As of this writing, out of 75,694 games that are rated on Steam (according to Steam DB), The Day Before is ranked 75,685th, putting it into the bottom ten of all time. This comes less than 24 hours after the game’s early access launch. Of the 10,207 Steam user reviews posted so far, 8,532 are negative. Nevertheless, two high-profile, triple-A releases sit lower on the Steam chart – NBA 2K24 and Overwatch 2 have worse ratings on Steam than The Day Before.
After locking down the official Discord and removing footage and trailers of The Day Before from its YouTube channel, Fntastic has now released the game’s first patch, alongside a statement.
“What can I say, EA’s [early access’s] release was quite challenging, Fntastic developer ‘Lilusoi’ says. “We realized that there are still a lot of things to work on and improve. Now the team is working on a patch that will fix dupes, critical crashes, problems with stash (missing items), and low number of zombies.
“All other bugs are also being thoroughly checked by us and are still in the process of being fixed and developed. In return, I would like to say that we appreciate your feedback and constructive criticism. In the future, we have global plans to improve the game, so your opinion is very important to us.”
Fntastic has since released the first The Day Before patch. Having played The Day Before both at launch and following the delivery of the first patch, PCGamesN has not observed any changes or improvements – all of the game’s initial problems seemingly remain.
Try some of the best survival games, if you want an alternative to The Day Before, or maybe the best multiplayer games on PC.
You can also follow us on Google News for daily PC games news, reviews, and guides, or grab our PCGN deals tracker to net yourself some bargains.