I found this disappointing, but not all bad. PC review.
First of all graphics wise it looks tremendous, it is truly immersive.
The day night cycle adds to this immersion as at night everything is dark and ominous, thus, you need use your flashlight and also keep your wits about you.
During the day its a graphic treat, farm lands, houses, towns, and all in-between looks good.
The time cycle is 1 hour day and 1 hour night, simple and well crafted.
Furthermore, characters are well designed, each can be leveled up the more you use them, but if you die with them they are gone for good, so its involves a sense of risk.
So far I have never felt truly threatened at losing a character, to be honest its quite easy to stay alive, this may change the further I go on missions but I have played for a while and nothing has changed.
Killing zombies is addictive but soon becomes repetitive, its basically just clicking hit as many times as you can until the zombie's head splatters.
The more you kill the higher your "fighting" level becomes, same with "cardio", "reflexes", "wits", "leadership", "stamina", "shooting".
This makes killing zombies fun.
Weapon choice is varied, nice array of melee and gun selections to choose from. No complaints here.
So why do I find SoD disappointing?
To start off there is not much to do.
Other than the normal straight forward missions, which are questionably average at best, there is not much more to do.
For example, you find a downed aircraft in the farm fields and it looks interesting, thus makes you want to go explore.
You venture to the craft only to find you can not interact with it at all, you can not go inside it to salvage anything. Its just a prop in the frame of the game, it looks good but is nothing more.
This is evident in many places.
The aim of the game is somewhat repetitive and standard, there is nothing wrong with the survival aspect, but it again it is just hugely plain.
Basically all you do is scour for some items in houses and bring it back to your base, this includes building materials, food, medicine, and ammo of which keeps the people at your home base content. You can build the odd construction in your base.
Now just sprinkle some average missions on top of that and you basically got SoD in a nutshell.
I found that I could not craft my own story into the limited framework of the game, this is sad as the world is an arguably fair size (more on the smaller scale) but there was just nothing more to do that missions and salvage.
Basically the game tells you to do this and that and that's all.
For example, go meet someone there, or help some survivors here.
This starts of alright but soon becomes plain boring to say the least.
With an open world one should want to go explore and find new things, interact with items and objects, do fun things, risky things, but this is not the case with SoD, there is just nothing to do.
Its just basically another game with almost nothing fresh or new.
All you do is salvage and do average, at best, missions.
The survival aspect is something new and well manufactured but does not equate the dullness of the game to what it could have been.
The zombie aspect in it, which also become dull after hours of game-play, is not pleasant either - eventually excitement dwindles as the Zeds dont pack too much of a punch and the feeling of being threatened and having to stay on your tip toes vanishes.
Bottom-line:
Good:
-Graphics
-Risk taking (losing characters)
-Exploring can be fun.
Bad:
-Easy to stay alive
-Boring zombies
-Average missions
-Repetitve salvaging of materials
-One can not craft their own story into the game