The Day Before Early Access Review

ign.com:

Editor’s Note: Faster than we could publish our early access review, the developer announced it was shutting down and The Day Before was removed from sale . The servers remain up for those who have bought it and not yet refunded, but since our reviewer went to the trouble of playing it, it seems only right that you should get to read what he thought of the experience while it lasted.

Five long years. That’s the amount of development time the (now-defunct) developer FNTASTIC supposedly took to assemble The Day Before. This wholly disappointing online zombie survival shooter contains essentially nothing of what was originally promised over the years leading up to its disastrous early access release. Not only is it not an MMO, but it hardly passes as a survival shooter, and I barely had time to put in a handful of hours before it went belly-up. During the very first – and, it turns out, the only – weekend I spent with it, I ran into such severe performance issues on my GeForce RTX 4070 Ti and Ryzen 3900x-equipped PC that it would’ve felt like a waste of my time to continue anyway. That is, even if the only thing to do in The Day Before – run around its questionably designed city, collecting loot until you either die or manage to bring enough back to purchase better gear for the next trip – was any fun to begin with.

There’s a basic yet functional story here: you wake up on a makeshift hospital bed in a ramshackle survivor camp in a decently-sized metropolis based loosely on New York City. It’s filled with questionable artwork and decals that look precariously similar to existing logos used by real-world businesses, but that might be forgivable if it was a parody. (Is it? That’s for the courts to decide.) Unfortunately,