We spent some hands-on time with upcoming survival adventure shooter Zeverland, which seems to be equal parts hardcore crafting/collecting and silly zombie-themed romp. In fact, the developers just told us that they will be pivoting away from a free-to-play MMO model and Zeverland will instead be a buy-to-play PvE survival crafting game. The team told us, “It will offer both a solo experience and co-op on private servers, so players can build and survive on their own or together with friends.”

During Zeverland’s second playtest, we got a glimpse at the early game quests, the path to starting our own settlement, and dipped our toes into the deadly city raids, attempting to find valuable plunder while risking transformative zombie infection. I think I would need more time to know how this stacks up to modern contemporaries in the genre, but I had a good time chopping and shooting my way to relative stability.

The most dramatic difference Zeverland has from peers in this sub genre is how it looks. Humans (and creatures who are no longer human) have exaggerated extremities and a big old noggin. Not quite chibi-style, more like a Funko Pop figure with a more proportional body.

It had to grow on me. Out the gate I was turned off by stalking through forests and fog zones looking like a dirty Bratz doll.“

I’ll be honest, it had to grow on me. Out the gate I was turned off by stalking through forests and fog zones looking like a dirty Bratz doll. But there is something evocative about the big expressive faces. This style is one of a few things that clash with the tone of the main story - it looks silly and almost playful but nothing about the narrative is at all - but it’s not the distraction it was several hours ago when I first logged on. I feel like every NPC I met was living in The Walking Dead, while every zombie I met, many of which were dressed in funny ways or just generally silly, was straight out of Zombieland. So much of what you can do in this game is just slapstick funny too, like shoving a partner in a shopping cart and ramming them into enemies, attaching a zombie head to a stick to make an impromptu weapon, or just throwing poop at people.

Anyone who has played a zombie survival game should be pretty familiar with what Zeverland is expecting from you, which doesn't really break with that well-established structure much out of the gate. Just about everything that isn’t the ground is searchable, breakable, and collectable and can be used on its own for an effect, or as part of a recipe to create something greater. Crafting in Zeverland is largely standard fare, but there are a few quirks that I found pretty interesting, like being able to make smaller adornments that can add bonuses to anything you can equip. You can also remove them, so if you like the patch you added to a shirt to raise defense but found a better shirt, you can move the adornment to the new gear. All items deteriorate, but you can repair them all without having to use a workbench so long as you have the materials.

When it comes to searching crates, trash cans, cabinets, etc, Zeverland resembles 7 Days to Die to me. The thing you’re searching in is a good indicator of what you can expect in it (a refrigerator having food in it, for instance) but there’s always a chance of something random or out of place being in there as well, like ammo. That usually means just searching everything because you never know what might be in a box – even if the box clearly labels what might be in it. But search when you're in a safe place, because rummaging takes time and you don’t want to be exposed while sorting through knicknacks.

Scavenging for stuff, and just about every other action you take in this dilapidated wilderness, accumulates experience points. Like Elder Scrolls games, that means the more you do something, the better you get at it. These experience points increase your level in a particular skill, and grant some skill points to spend on them to improve specific aspects of it. There's two different groups of skills your XP funnel into: life skills and combat skills. Life skills are your crafting and survival features and combat focuses on your weapons. The skill trees for all of these individual skills are relatively deep for a game like this, and I felt like skill points were coming to me at a regular clip, so if I was more focused on simply leveling up, I could have probably gotten pretty far down said trees fairly easily. But I appreciated that I didn’t have to grind to feel like I was getting reasonably better.

Investing in these skills are the backbone of your progress, even if it doesn't seem all that important out the gate. The life skills you can buy with points seemed pretty straightforward. The first aid branch gives you options like recipes to craft better healing items or bonuses to the healing effects of those you have already, and you’ll really appreciate the difference when you're stuck in a building full of zombies with only a few seconds to patch yourself up before moving to the next deadly room. This goes doubly for weapon skills, which felt pretty overpowered once I started stacking some of their abilities. Increasing the duration and damage of the bleed condition that comes from bladed weapons was a particularly strong move that helped me really decimate enemies efficiently.

Weapons were in abundance, not only because it seemed like most zeds had one on them, but also because with some glue or duct tape, just about anything can be combined with some wood or a stick to create some sort of improvised implement of death. I wasn't quite sure what I was supposed to do with a GPU I found in a box until I realized I could attach it to a broom and make an impromptu axe. This kind of creativity was fun and played back into the kind of overall layer of light-hearted silliness that envelopes Zeverland.

My frankenweapon was rendered pretty obsolete quickly, though, as I found some guns pretty early on - something that usually takes hours to find and craft in other survival games - just on a zombie randomly waving it around like, well, a zombie with a gun. And these weapons were strong, but it never felt like I was so strong that I was never in danger. Zombies of all sizes hit respectably strong, and getting into melee tussles with any of them always felt like a risk. Add two or three at a time, and things could get very dicey very quickly. Only on a handful of occasions was I ever in real danger, but I appreciated Zeverland forcing me to respect the lethality of these creatures, even if they had silly cardboard boxes on their heads.

I admit a big part of why I didn’t see the respawn screen as often as I should have was because of the recruitable NPC companions you can encounter. I found one early, a nurse named Sandra, who guided me through the early quests in order to get to the town where my shelter was built. She never left my side, and played two key roles for me when it was time to rumble with the undead. Firstly, as soon as a zombie swung at me, she would spring into action to attack it, sometimes even diverting its attention altogether so that I was free to shoot from a distance. Secondly, if I went down, she could revive me before the timer ran out so long as she wasn’t also down. The downside to companions is that you need to keep them kitted up with supplies, because they suffer from the same things you will without them, though you can also direct them to stay in your shelter to craft stuff and maintain things while you're away.

Instead of dying outright, I was presented with an interesting option: respawn as normal, or become a Zed myself. “

Thirst and especially hunger were constant adversaries for me early on. It was very difficult to find enough food for two people in the town that became the host of my starter settlement, and after exhausting all of the berry bushes in the nearby woodlands, I wouldn't find any real sustenance until we ventured out into harm's way, eventually raiding old grocery stores for raw veggies and cans of whatever we can find. Planting farms is a long-term possibility for a sustainable food source, but I didn't have the time to invest in the limited playtest to see a burgeoning carrot patch grow to a size of any real value. Going hungry can be dangerous, as you won't passively heal anymore, and when you're truly starving, you’ll actually start to lose health. It took me an unfortunately long time to get a reasonable amount of food - and to invest in enough recipes to turn that food into a reliable hunger-killer - before I could move on to the big goal in front of me: driving into the danger zone.

Zeverland’s map is spotted with the remains of smaller towns, along with a couple of bigger urban areas boasting a higher density of abandoned stuff to find and zombies to “guard” it. But uniquely, a deadly reddish fog covers big swaths of the map, including a tower I needed to get to to call for survivors. In this fog are stronger versions of the more normal zeds, and gnarlier mutants who barely qualify as being called a zombie at all. You need a special mask with limited filtering capacity to navigate these sections without being poisoned to death, so every excursion is on the clock.

The hardest part of getting to the foggy city in my playtest run was finding enough gas to get there by vehicle. It took a very long time for me to even find enough fuel to get started, let alone enough to get all the way to the destination. And for me, a vehicle seems necessary, as I couldn't imagine travelling through the fog zones on foot with the increased amount of violent zeds lurking behind every bush and building.

Fighting my way through the fog and into the tower was easier than attempting to escape the zone, as my respirator ran out and it was now a race to see if I could speed a hijacked fire truck to safety before I succumbed to the fog. I didn’t, but instead of dying outright, I was presented with an interesting option: respawn as normal, or become a Zed myself. I resisted the urge to mutate into a monster, as I was determined to see this quest through before the playtest ended, but the dangling carrot of becoming the enemy really stuck with me long after the playtest ended. From what I’ve gathered about the experience, you actually can grow and mutate based on other creatures you consume, be they animals, other zeds, or even other players. It’s unclear how long you can go on this way - could I hypothetically just abandon all the stuff I’ve built and be a zed forever?

That joins a lot of other lingering questions I still have for Zeverland as a whole, like what kind of unique challenges will higher level encounters bring, what kind of gameplay does co-op add outside of doing the same things but with friends, and what exactly am I supposed to do with all this poop I keep accumulating? Outside of these mysteries, Zeverland is tedious in the same ways lots of zombie survival games can be, but it's fun and creative in ways a lot its peers aren’t. Will this be enough to pull you away from your current favorite survival obsession?

Jarrett Green is a longtime contributor to IGN. Say hello on X @Jarrettjawn.