Exit Ways Review

A Zombie-Infested Extraction Shooter From a Three-Person Team, and It Shows

Exit Ways is a PvEvP survival extraction shooter built around a straightforward pitch: rescue survivors, craft gear, build a base, and extract loot from zombie-infested maps while also watching for other players who might kill you and take it all. It's the work of ASKES, a developer whose own devlog posts describe themselves plainly as "three factory workers" making a game in their spare time, and that scrappy, small-team origin is visible in both the game's ambition and its rough execution. The pitch leans on genre staples familiar from Escape from Tarkov and similar extraction shooters — gear fear, base-building progression, a reputation system tied to NPC "Reclaimers," and a promise of "no wipes" so player progress persists — layered with a zombie-apocalypse survival theme that's meant to differentiate it from the increasingly crowded extraction-shooter field.

Exit Ways entered Early Access on September 7, 2026 after well over a year of devlogs, playtests, and delays dating back to mid-2025, and sells for $11.69 with a 15% launch discount applied. The extended pre-launch runway makes the state of the actual release all the more notable.

A Launch-Week Catastrophe, Reflected in an Overwhelmingly Negative Pool

Exit Ways has accumulated 248 total Steam reviews since launch, with a "Mostly Negative" rating (23% positive) and 101 of those reviews in English — the vast majority describing a launch that went badly wrong. One reviewer's account is representative: "Absolute dumpster fire of a launch... I spent the first 15 minutes just trying to get past the loading screen, only to get slapped with 'Server Error' over and over again. When I finally forced my way into a lobby, the performance was completely unplayable." Another reviewer with 7 minutes of playtime reports servers going down "6 minutes after launch" and criticizes the developer's terse in-Discord messaging.

The most consistently cited flashpoint beyond the technical failures is the developer's community response. Multiple reviewers independently report that ASKES closed text channels in their own Discord server during the worst of the launch chaos. One reviewer frames it sympathetically, explaining the closure came after "overwhelming toxicity due to server overload... a bunch of people whining that the games not up and screaming refuse and spamming while saying a lot of racial slurs." Another reviewer takes the opposite read: "Now devs are closing all text channels in discord because the devs can't take criticism about their game not being ready." Whichever framing is accurate, the closure itself became a second controversy layered on top of the technical one, and it's referenced across a striking number of the sampled reviews.

A Handful of Patient Reviewers See a Real Game Underneath the Wreckage

Not every review is scorched earth. A minority of players who returned after the initial chaos describe genuine appreciation for the underlying concept. One 13-hour player writes, "Now there might be a lot of bugs but the owners are really trying there hardest to fix it... It is very addicting to play for sure... There are a lot of quests and things to do," while carefully cataloging a long list of known bugs and asking other players for patience, "REMEMBER this is still early access." Another reviewer who stuck with it after server stabilization concludes, "For a small indie dev it's a fun game. Some things need tweaking like enemies hp is really high and should be lowered but the guns feel good and the quests can be [enjoyable]."

Even several negative reviewers concede the foundation has promise. One writes, "This game has good bones, but a horrible dev team behind it," describing a session where extraction, combat, and looting worked as intended before technical issues resurfaced. Another sums up the split verdict plainly: "I'm sure this game can become a lot of fun once some of the bugs and technical issues are ironed out. I really like the core idea and can see a lot of potential here." The rapid post-launch patch cadence — multiple numbered EA patches nearly every day through the first two weeks — is at least consistent with a team actively trying to stabilize the game rather than abandoning it.

Broken Progression Systems, an Unfinished UI, and an Unsubstantiated Development Accusation

Beyond server stability, the most substantive design complaint is that the blueprint and progression systems don't work as intended. One reviewer explains: "The blueprint system is basically useless. You can obtain every weapon so easily that blueprints have no real purpose," undermining a core extraction-shooter incentive loop where scarcity is supposed to drive tension. Interface problems are cited repeatedly and specifically: one reviewer notes the settings menu doesn't allow adjusting frame rate cap or resolution, and that "the building overlay... materials requirement text overlapped with other UI elements." Others describe being unable to change graphics settings without the game crashing entirely.

One reviewer's terse complaint deserves being reported plainly and with appropriate hedging: "poor game, ai vibecoded, full of bugs, crashes and more other [expletive]." This is an unsubstantiated accusation from a single dissenting reviewer about the game's own development process, not echoed elsewhere in the sample, and should be read as one player's suspicion rather than a documented fact — but given how many other reviewers separately describe systemic bugs, broken matchmaking ("no match found" errors), and players spawning on top of each other in what's supposed to be a fair-fight extraction format, it's understandable why some players reached for that explanation.

Verdict

Exit Ways launched into a wall of server outages, broken matchmaking, an unfinished settings menu, and a progression system multiple reviewers call pointless — the kind of rough opening that would be forgivable for a scrappy three-person team's passion project if the reviews didn't also describe a community-management misstep in the form of shuttered Discord channels during the worst of it. There's a real, patient minority of players finding genuine fun in the extraction-shooter-meets-zombie-survival loop once the servers cooperate, and the rapid patch cadence suggests the team hasn't walked away. But at $11.69, in its current Early Access state, this is a game to watch from a distance rather than buy into — the "good bones" reviewers keep mentioning are currently buried under launch-week wreckage that ASKES will need considerably more than two weeks to dig out from.