Most of the time, the checkpointing is on your side too, albeit unpredictably. They don’t evolve much, but that’s in How To Survive’s favour - like Dead Rising, there's a solid capability curve as you go from handling a few at once to taking on entire hordes without even breaking a sweat. Enemies can come from anywhere, including sealed rooms and more than once out of thin air, and do serious damage. En mass of course, the zombies are more effective. This makes I Am Legend look like a bar fight. Zombie fiction loves to tell us that we're the real monsters, but damn. Shine a torch on them - the batteries never run out - and they freeze or run, incapable of defending themselves from the mute with the machete.
Easily the most pathetic are the nocturnal zombies, who are meant to make travel by night dangerous. To How To Survive's credit, popping zombies does have that all-important bubble-wrap satisfaction, and targeting is easy and precise enough - though zombie pile-ons are as little fun as ever, and it's a little depressing for humanity as a whole just how much more dangerous than us undead ostriches and deer turn out to be. Combat itself at least is solid not great, but acceptable. Bullets are everywhere, and arrows easily crafted/retrieved. Ammo could have offered one, but it’s functionally unlimited. More unfortunately, as much as H2S wants you to craft its wilder, wackier gear, it soon succumbs to the common crafting game problem of offering no good reason to trade in a rifle that kills damn near everything in one shot for a bladed boomerang or whatever. Weapons are more entertaining to craft, even if most blueprints you find aren’t that exciting. It’s just busy-work, even sillier than the way that supposed safehouses actually attract enemies when you open the door and come filled with enough undead to double as zombie clown cars.
There's no reason to ever not make the poultice though, since cloth is everywhere, crafting is done in the inventory, and time freezes when doing it, even mid-battle. Early on, for instance, it's shown that using a healing plant - and the fact that there are healing plants is a pretty good demonstration of how gamey this is - provides a minor health boost, while combining it with fabric will produce a more effective poultice. This can be even further mitigated with perks after a couple of level-ups, quickly making the whole non-zombie related survival element half implemented at best, and half thought out at worst. You need food, sleep and water to fight, but the maps are tiny and well enough stocked that you’re never more than a quick jog away from handling any of them. Imagine Dead Island as a twin-stick shooter, and you're most of the way to what How To Survive is - the main addition being Sims-style Need bars, which are so easily kept in check that they fade into irrelevance almost immediately.
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