End of Days

I want to root for End of Days. Solo development stories are some of the most quietly heroic things happening in PC gaming right now, and Starkium's project has genuine ambition packed into its low-poly bones. The pitch is a VR-capable zombie horde shooter drawing on COD: Zombies, Dead Rising, and Left 4 Dead, with crafting, weapon customization, co-op multiplayer, and even a planned level builder with workshop support. On paper, that reads like a tight arcade survival loop with real depth. In practice, what you actually install tells a harder story. The game's DNA is Call of Duty: Zombies mode stretched into a standalone experience. You hold out against escalating undead waves, buy open doors and obstacles to expand your play area, and raid a mystery box for random weapon loadouts. Weapons include a Kar98k bolt-action, an M4A1 with attachments like suppressors and holographic sights, melee options like a knife and katana, and power-ups such as Bullet Rain and Fire Storm. The VR implementation adds physical weapon handling, meaning you manually load clips, rack the slide, and chamber rounds before firing. For VR players who enjoy that tactile ceremony, there is something genuinely appealing in that friction. For flatscreen players (non-VR support was still listed as forthcoming at various points), the experience is considerably thinner. Here is what the store page screenshots cannot prepare you for: the developer's own candid notes make clear the current build is not representative of where the project is heading. The codebase has been rewritten seven times. The art style has shifted more than once. AI behavior, window-boarding mechanics, and leaderboard systems have been in "coming next update" status across multiple dev logs. The zombie perception system, which adds a stealth layer alongside the wave-shooting core, is a genuinely promising design idea, and random map generation plus drones appeared in at least one itch.io build. Whether those features are present and stable in the version you download today is genuinely uncertain. Who is this actually for? Patient Early Access supporters with a soft spot for one-developer climbs. People who want to track a solo project from rough prototype to something more complete. VR owners who like physically simulated firearms and do not mind rough edges. It is not for players seeking a polished zombie shooter with active matchmaking, solid AI, and consistent feature parity between updates. The concurrent player count has hovered near zero for a long time, which means co-op as advertised is effectively a solo experience by default. There is real heart in End of Days. The inspirations are good, the VR weapon handling concept is sound, and a developer who rewrites their game seven times and keeps going clearly cares. But caring is not the same as finished. Right now, buying in means betting on a future version, not enjoying a present one.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

Be the first to comment on End of Days.