Alien Apocalypse

Scavenge, craft, and fight back after the invasion

Alien Apocalypse's pitch sits squarely in familiar survival-sandbox territory, just with its zombies swapped for extraterrestrials: the invasion has already happened, and you're left scavenging an open world for resources, crafting gear and defences, and gradually pushing back against the alien presence that's taken over, solo or with friends in co-op. It's a premise more than one reviewer says they were specifically hoping someone would attempt well, and the game arrives with a substantial pre-release history of its own — a Steam Next Fest demo run in mid-2026 that several reviewers specifically played and compared against before deciding whether to buy the finished Early Access release.

The comparison every reviewer reaches for

Almost without exception, reviewers frame Alien Apocalypse against Project Zomboid, and the comparison cuts both ways. One reviewer bluntly summarises the game as "Zomboid... different skin, not better, different," while another, more detailed critical review goes further, arguing the AI feels like it's "cheating" by always closing distance on the player without properly "seeing" them first, and contrasting that unfavourably with what they describe as Zomboid's more thoroughly simulated enemy behaviour. That's a demanding standard to be held to, but it's the standard reviewers are choosing to apply, and the game's current state doesn't yet meet it for a meaningful share of its early audience.

Where the combat and crafting land well

Set against that critical framing, several reviewers describe real strengths once the game's systems are working as intended. One detailed positive review calls the combat "pretty rough at times on medium — which is great," specifically praising enemies that "actually try to fight with some strategy" in a way that feels "almost souls-like" rather than a simple zerg-rush, and separately praising detailed, streamlined crafting and genuinely distinct-looking outfit customisation. Another reviewer, more measured, still credits the game with obvious thought and effort behind its core mechanics, even while flagging the lack of gamepad support as a real gap for a game whose control scheme otherwise reads as built for twin-stick play.

Bugs, crashes, and a broken tutorial

The most serious and recurring category of complaint is stability. Multiple reviewers report the tutorial itself failing outright — one writes simply "wow, even the tutorial is broken," and another describes the game freezing to a full black screen mid-tutorial, forcing a hard restart. Beyond the tutorial specifically, reviewers report inconsistent graphics settings that reset on opening the menu, a controller layout that reportedly worked in the demo but broke in the full release, players falling through the map and taking injury, and being detected and attacked by aliens from well beyond reasonable sightlines, including through walls. One reviewer summarises the launch bluntly as needing "at least one more year in cooking" before it becomes genuinely enjoyable to play solo, while allowing that co-op players might be having a meaningfully better time of it.

A developer already responding

To the developer's credit, the post-launch pace of updates has been dense: the store's news feed shows patches addressing performance, combat and loot balance, multiplayer lag, inventory bugs, and general instability on an almost daily basis through the weeks following Early Access launch. Several reviewers have gone back and edited their own reviews to note the improvement — one writes that "there have been updates and it seems the devs care about the game," upgrading their assessment from "not in a playable state" to "perfectly playable" within the same review. That's a genuinely positive signal about the team's post-launch commitment, even though it doesn't retroactively fix the rough state many players encountered at launch itself.

What the achievement data shows

Global achievement data, spanning 52 tracked milestones, tells a story that lines up closely with the review base's account of a game whose systems fray the longer a session goes on. 54.7% of players complete the tutorial, but that already drops to 45% surviving a single in-game day, and to 25.8% managing a single kill against the game's basic "Chaser" enemy type. From there the curve collapses hard: survivability milestones for ten and one hundred in-game days sit at 0.7% and 0.1% respectively, and several higher-tier skill and endurance achievements sit at effectively zero completion across the tracked player base. That's consistent with reviewers' accounts of a game that's still finding its footing on stability and difficulty tuning well before long-session, long-term survival becomes a realistic goal for most players. Notably, the achievements tied to raising individual character skills to their maximum level sit almost uniformly below 1%, which matches multiple reviewers' complaints that the crafting and progression systems, while extensive on paper, currently take a punishing amount of time and stability just to reach in a single unbroken run.

Final verdict

Alien Apocalypse arrives in Early Access with a genuinely appealing premise and enough evidence in its combat and crafting systems to justify the comparisons to Project Zomboid that nearly every reviewer reaches for, but its launch state is rough in ways that go beyond the usual growing pains of a new survival sandbox — broken tutorials, wall-clipping enemy detection, and outright crashes are a heavier burden than "needs balancing" alone. The developer's rapid, near-daily patch cadence is a real point in its favour, and reviewers who've stuck around report genuine improvement week over week, but at NZ$27.99 this is currently a recommendation only for survival-genre diehards prepared to treat the next few months as the game's real testing period, rather than players looking for a finished experience today.