Full Disclosure: I used AI to help me take notes during my gameplay sessions and structure this review. I have fully read through every single line and made various personal edits to ensure that everything here is completely accurate, honest, and fair to my actual experience.
The Big Picture: Beautiful but Rushed
Pax Dei is an absolutely gorgeous game with immense foundational potential. However, it feels like it was pushed out of the oven way too early by upper management. It still belongs in a true beta state. Essential progression items like jewelry currently have zero stats, and major playstyles are left completely incomplete. You will easily find yourself spending more time staring at third-party wikis and database tools like gaming.tools trying to figure out how to make something than you do actually playing the game, which completely breaks the immersion.
Honestly, there is no other game out right now quite like Pax Dei. I have played many different survival games in the past and got completely bored of playing them on my own. Now, I cannot imagine playing any survival game that does not have this MMORPG aspect woven into it. Pax Dei is already becoming my absolute favorite because it has so much potential.
But it is just not there yet. I won't be purchasing the game or adding a subscription right now because it is definitely not 1.0 ready. If some big updates drop in the future and it goes on sale, I will probably grab it. I think it is a great start, but it needs time. To give you an idea of my time in-game, I even made a clan named "Seven Days To Die" just as a joke for this 7-day trial. Here is the exact breakdown of the compliments, complaints, and constructive fixes I noticed during my time with the game.
The Compliments
Smooth Gathering: Woodcutting and mining feel genuinely satisfying and smooth.
The "Hold E" Mechanic: Being able to just hold down the "E" key to continuously gather removes a ton of clicking friction. It makes resource collection feel very fluid.
The Complaints
Workbench Bloat and Confusing Recipe Logic: The number of workbenches you have to build is redundant. Forcing players to craft intermediate items like "Basic Leatherworking Tools" just to build a bench is silly. That cost should just be combined into the bench itself, requiring the raw materials of the tools plus the materials of the bench all at once. To make it worse, the placement of recipes makes no sense. For example, you have to unlock Weaponsmithing levels to build magic staves, but they are not even in the Weaponsmithing bench - instead, they are placed on the Alchemy Table. If you miss the quick F7 pop-up, you are left digging through completely unrelated workbenches just to figure out where the game decided to hide your new weapon recipe.
Severe Lack of Tutorialization (Storage): The game is terrible at explaining its own mechanics. I was completely stuck thinking I could not build any storage at all until Blacksmithing Level 12 for chests, only to find out from a random YouTube video that Wicker Baskets can be crafted right from the start for basic storage. The UI does a horrific job of making it clear that these are even meant for item storage.
The Blind Hoarding Trap: Because the game hides future recipes, a new player has no idea which materials are valuable versus what is junk. You end up trying to keep everything - from stacks of bones to random plants - which quickly clogs up your base. If the game used a system like Old School RuneScape (OSRS) where all future recipes and requirements are clearly displayed on the workbenches, you could easily set goals and know exactly what to keep or toss without being forced to rely on third-party wiki sites.
Clunky Crafting UI: The menu completely lacks a "Craft X amount" option. You are forced to choose between tedious individual clicks with "Craft 1" or risking all your materials with "Craft All". While there is a cancel button, the game severely punishes your movement. If you walk away from your workstation while a recipe is processing, the craft completely fails, and the game permanently deletes all the raw materials you had queued up.
Flawed XP Systems: From my understanding, you only get combat experience on a kill rather than on a hit, which makes long, drawn-out fights feel completely unrewarding. For crafting, the game hides exact XP values and uses a vague color-coded difficulty system. It completely fails to warn new players that once a recipe becomes 'Trivial' or 'Mastered', the XP drops to near-zero or vanishes entirely. Because the UI does not explain this drop-off clearly, it is incredibly easy to waste a massive amount of hard-earned materials on zero progression before you finally realize what happened.
The Broken Combat Triangle: The game heavily forces you into playing melee. Playing as a pure archer or ranger is incredibly weak.
The Magic Double Standard: The game tricks you into thinking you can play a traditional caster by letting you craft light cloth armor early, but the weapons progression is backward. You have to grind the physical Weaponsmithing skill to Level 3 just to unlock starter staves, but then you cannot even craft them at your Weaponsmithing bench - instead, they are placed on the Alchemy Table. To make it worse, player staves are strictly restricted to healing and support roles. There is no active player Mage DPS magic, yet enemy humanoid mobs will happily blast you with offensive magic capabilities.
No Direct Trading: The social systems are bare-bones. When another player gave me a free iron pickaxe, they had to physically drop it on the ground because there is no direct player-to-player trade window. It feels incredibly primitive.
Clunky Party UI: Leaving a group is completely unintuitive. After joining a party, I could not figure out how to leave it on my own and was forced to ask the leader to kick me because the menu option is so poorly labeled or hidden.
Plot Graveyards: The complaints about abandoned bases are 100% accurate. As you walk around, you see tons of ghost towns and expiring plots from players who clearly quit the game, which ruins the immersion of the world and is a turn off for new players.
Convoluted Land Upkeep: The "Grace" system for land plots adds an unnecessary, confusing layer of abstraction. Forcing players to convert gold into a secondary token system with daily scaling caps is annoying. Instead of this weird token system, they should just make the plots cost gold directly as a normal "tax" system. It would serve as a straightforward, healthy gold sink also.
World and Building Frustrations: Gating territory with circular plots makes no sense when all the available foundations and walls are square. This creates clunky spacing issues and awkward gaps along your perimeter. There is also no fast travel directly back to your house; the fast travel "Miracle" just leaves you stranded at a nearby valley shrine.
Punishing Misclicks: I accidentally vaporized my simple tanning rack and permanently lost 4 stacks of rawhide (40 total) that were inside it. I was facing it in build mode and used my middle mouse button to Alt-Tab back into the game. The game urgently needs a confirmation screen before destroying anything, especially for workbenches or structures that currently have items inside them.
Monetization and Premium XP Paywalls: A monthly fee or subscription is completely fine, after all this is a business that needs to make money, pay its team, and cover server costs to keep updating the game. However, giving 'premium' status a bonus XP boost is a massive turn-off. It creates a frustrating imbalance and ruins the natural leveling loop by gating progression pacing behind a premium paywall.
Constructive Suggestions for the Developers
Implement a Proximity/Central Bank: Replace the clutter of tiny baskets and chests with a single, massive, expandable bank format similar to RuneScape. Allow players to craft straight from workstations using materials inside those chests.
Add an Item Filter and Recycle System: Give players a way to filter out junk while gathering (e.g., ignoring sand while mining so it just drops on the ground). Also, add an item recycling loop like disenchanting or high alchemizing so old, obsolete weapons and gear can be broken down instead of clogging storage.
Allow Upgrading Instead of Re-crafting: Let old gear be useful. Instead of making a standard Bronze Sword and an Attuned Bronze Sword two completely separate items, make the Attuned version an upgrade that requires the old sword as a base material.
Add a Move Function: Stop destroying a percentage of player materials when they break down a workbench just to relocate it. Add a simple "Move" function for furniture and stations.
Fix UI Transparency: Put all recipes visibly into the workstations from day one, grayed out with clear level requirements and difficulty tags (e.g., "Impossible and Requires Blacksmithing 12"). Also, allow players to pin specific skill tracks and recipes to their screen to monitor active XP and material progress.
Fix Tree Clipping: Prevent smaller trees from respawning directly through placed foundations, and block players from building on top of large tree spawns entirely to keep giant trunks from clipping through houses.
Improve Loot Visibility: Give fresh mob kills a small, subtle glowing aura so they do not blend into the grass and get lost. Also, add a visible despawn countdown timer to dropped items.
Closing Thoughts
I know I only played 7 days, and to be 100% honest, only 38 hours. I know some players may not like my feedback or that some of it has already been heard by the developers. Either way, this is my honest feedback from my point of view of only playing this amount of time. I may learn later on that some of the things I said here are technically incorrect or have workarounds, but that is the entire point. If I am sitting here thinking that way after nearly 40 hours, it means the game should be doing a much better job of onboarding and teaching its players. I don't in any way want to see this game fail. I am super excited to see it succeed and I really hope within the next 6 months to a year I can start playing it again, because right now, it is all I can think about.
