First off, a thanks to dorianvow for a copy of the access.

Anyways... this game is a particular kind of beast that has never existed before, and one that may change the nature of how MMORPGs run things. Or not. This game has some very innovative, but frustrating ideas to it, ones that make it both hard to play, but also make you want to come back.

You are alone.

Like a baby, you are born into the world with next to nothing. A shirt, a pair of pants, shoes, a flashlight, and a battery for it. Quite literally that is it.

The game keeps you as close to real life as you can get in a game like this. You have pockets, but their space is limited. There are weapons... but those can be hard to find, and sometimes they're so damaged it's not worth taking them for fear they might break. You have to worry about food and drink, keeping hydrated for the long hikes and runs.

There is no mini-map, there is no HUD, there is no targeting reticle. You are given only a single point as your reference of where you're looking. If you find a can of food, but there's nothing you have to open it with... you'll need to find something, eventually. Otherwise a can of beans becomes a horrid taunt as you sit there starving.

I am not joking. You are alone. There is no quick travel, there is no transport system.

All of this complete solitude before you run into the other two factors in this work. The Zombies, and the other Players.

The slight advantage of having someone you can trust with a bog-standard MMO or PVP takes on a whole new meaning in this game. The first person I met on my own who wasn't my friend called out he could hear me upstairs. Since I didn't know the controls, I didn't know how to turn on my mic, and thus couldn't tell him I would be willing to give up everything and walk. I didn't want trouble. He fed me something poisonous, and then shot me in the head.

The second person I met who wasn't my friend I never met. I just heard the chatter of automatic fire and was rendered unconscious and bleeding to death.

The third called out when he spotted me, armed with a shotgun and not taking chances that he didn't want any trouble. From what I've read of other blogs, most of the time people shoot first and second, and then ask questions to your corpse as they loot it. I pointed my gun at the door, and I told him I didn't want any trouble, and I was going to leave him free to scrounge.

The third guy told me good luck. I didn't chance his luck including a bullet in my skull. I hid, and got off the game.

Because of the fact that when you die you lose everything, followed by the fact that that everything is dependant on what you can find where you go... You find yourself feeling a visceral sense of fear and paranoia for your character. Is the next building a savior or a death sentence? You become almost scared to hear footsteps because it means someone else is there. Someone who you can't trust, and who might mean you have to pull the trigger. And realize when you end their life, you're ending their story for now. They begin again, and may never see you again... but you still ended it.

And I say all of that before getting to the zombies... because by comparison, the zombies are pretty much a blessing. You know what they are and what they do. They scream, they run at you, and they either die again or eat you. While they can make you panic, you quickly learn to pull your axe, whack them in the face, and get on with life.

Taking a page from Walking Dead... the dead become much easier to negotiate than the living. I'd rather deal with running from a dozen zombies than see if I really can pull the trigger. But then, that's something that's going to be forced on me eventually.

Tonight, I was shot at again, but this time I survived. I think I was just winged. My backup and I worked tactically and methodically to clear one building, and we went to the next on an airfield so that we could make sure we got everything valuable... only for me not to clear the stairs. I was lucky this time... two of us there together made it so that the other guy ran rather than die. My buddy took a parting shot, and then got me a saline bag to help with the blood loss. I was better, but the lesson was there.

Despite my buddy... I am alone.

Sitting back and taking a breath from the game, I can tell you that this game frustrates me, it challenges me, and it makes me realize how poor of an FPS player I am. But I am also engaged by the sheer and simple mechanic of the game. And as frustrating as every death becomes, it also becomes the challenge of whether or not you can recover from the loss. It's still in Alpha and you run into several small bugs with sound, with zombie detection, and with items spawning but not able to be used in the way they're supposed to. But what they have at the moment is beautiful. The world looks real, it feels real.

If you pick this up, good luck to you... I hope one day we meet and it won't be from behind the sights of a gun.