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The Day Before has finally been released after three delays and a development cycle plagued by issues and controversy. And it looks like those issues have taken their toll, because The Day Before is seemingly dead on arrival, with players complaining of everything from lack of content and poor servers to false advertising and use of AI content.
When it was first revealed back in 2021, the title was billed as an open-world zombie survival game, with a focus on large multiplayer worlds for players to explore. Naturally, with a billing like that, prospective players were getting their hopes up about what the final game would look like. But following three rounds of delays and even claims that the game was a scam, it looks like the final product has fallen very far short of those expectations.
Immediately upon launch, the game’s Steam page was hit with a barrage of negative reviews, currently sitting at only a 15% positive rating from over 10,000 reviews, giving it an ‘Overwhelmingly Negative’ score. Most of these reviews accuse the developers of misselling the game, saying that the open world experience they had been promised had been replaced with “bad Tarkov with zombies”.
And those accusations seem especially bad when it was revealed that developers FNTASTIC had removed the majority of videos from their official YouTube channel, supposedly to ‘hide any evidence’ of the version of the game they had previously been marketing.
As well as the apparent misrepresentation of the game, its release has been fraught with gameplay issues and people struggling to get into servers. And as for the game itself, clunky movement and a seemingly empty world lacking in content have seen players refunding the game in droves. There have even been accusations that posters and billboards found in-game have been made using AI art, prompting players to ask what the delays had actually been for.
It’s a shame to see any game launch poorly, especially as The Day Before had been one of the most wishlisted games on Steam prior to its launch. Games like No Man’s Sky have proven that it’s more than possible for developers to revive a game over time, and we’ll simply have to wait and see if FNTASTIC are able to recover from this initial launch to give people the game they’ve been waiting for all this time.
