Move over 7 Days to Die, you're not the only Zombie survival game in town with a recent overhaul. Project Zomboid is another that just released an absolutely massive Beta update to try out.

Included in their "IWBUMS" (I Will Back Up My Save) Beta branch on Steam (not on GOG until stable) is the first step towards Project Zomboid version 41. The amount of changes included is quite ridiculous. The Indie Stone even said it's the "most fundamental and wide-ranging update that Project Zomboid has ever had" and they're not wrong.

This latest Beta is work towards making Project Zomboid feel a little more alive and have a wider variety for everything. It's a foundation to bring even more big changes to PZ, with the new animation work in this build helping to bring wild animals in the next major build. This Beta is expected to last a while, as they have more to add back into it.

Some Highlights:

New gameplay styles: Builder, Brawler and Survivor

More deadly ‘Survivor’ (Survival) gameplay balance – player can be dragged down by horde and feasted upon etc.

New survivor abilities: sitting, sneaking, sprinting, jogging, racking, reloading, climbing, fence-jumping, collapsing and much much more.

New combat, new weapons, new difficulty balance.

New character creation – many, many different new clothing options both on spawn and discoverable in the world as loot or on zombies.

New zombie behaviour: feasting on recent corpses, lolling against walls, falling over fences etc.

Blood system that progressively bloodies bodies and clothing of survivors and zombies

New injury system – movement and combat visibly hampered when injured. Lacerations now possible, an injury state that lies between bites and scratches.

Improved gunplay: green/red aiming outline, new guns, improved racking and reloading, increased gun loot spawn.

Zombie Death Scenes – zombies discovered in the situations in which people died. Prayer meetings, sports-viewing parties, survivor zeds wearing backpacks etc.

Situational zombie type/clothing and inventories – cop zeds in police station, firemen zeds in burnt buildings, Chef zeds in restaurant kitchens, bride and groom zeds at a wedding ceremony in church etc.

Clothing protection: different clothing provides different levels of protection from zombie attacks.

Server-side saving: MP save system now in a server-side database. Offline SP-side, also means no more lost cars via irl power outages.

That's just me picking a few fun things and there's seriously loads, see them all here.

If you wish to try it out on Steam you need to right click on the game, go to Properties and hit the Beta tab and then find it in the dropdown box:

At least the name is pretty clear, I don't need to remind you to back anything up do I?

Don't own it yet? You can purchase a copy from Humble Store, GOG and Steam.