'The Day Before 2?': Everyone is skeptical about this survival game promising a map five times the size of DayZ and 5,000 players per server

Survival game fans are an eternally hopeful lot. We're always on the lookout for the next great open world sandbox offering up a new survival experience. Your game has base-building? Crafting? Exploring? Survival systems? You've already got our attention.

But we're a wary group, too. We've been burned far too many times in the past.

That explains the mostly skeptical reaction to the new trailer for CrisisX you can see above (via IGN), a free-to-play open world survival game from HK Hero Entertainment. The trailer shows a bunch of survival-ish things happening, like tree-chopping, base-building, zombie shooting, and PvP combat with other players, though none of it looks particularly interesting. Its Steam page also makes some big promises, like a 1200x1200 km map (about five times the size of DayZ's Chernarus) and support for 5,000 players on a single server.

The phase that keeps coming up in the trailer's comments and on the Steam page? "The Day Before."

"The Day Before comeback?" says one commenter on YouTube.

"28 Days Before," says another.

"The day after the day before crisis," another adds.

"7 Days to Die Before The Day Before: Origins," says another.

I did think of The Day Before while watching the trailer myself, the game that hyped survival fans so much it became the most-wishlisted game on Steam before crashing and burning immediately when it launched in 2023—and then had the audacity to try to relaunch in 2024, which also failed.

I'm not saying CrisisX is the same situation as The Day Before, but it's got the same sort of bland, generic survival checklist feel that doesn't inspire confidence. A huge map not filled with much of anything. Stiff-looking combat. Pristine cars and motorcycles that don't exactly smack of the post-apocalypse. Zombies, because if you're going to be the millionth game to copy DayZ's homework, you've gotta have zombies. Poker and slot machines. Okay, admittedly, I am on board with it having poker and slot machines. But otherwise, I don't see anything to get excited about here.

On the other hand, unlike The Day Before, CrisisX is going to be free to play when it launches, so there's no risk in giving it a look when it comes out. According to my Steam history, I played The Day Before for a grand total of nine minutes before quitting. Hopefully, I'll last longer than that in CrisisX, and hopefully it'll last longer than The Day Before.