State of Decay Review
Zombies, Zombies, Zombies, don’t talk to me about Zombies. Everywhere you look now-days the legions of the undead are there moaning. Brad Pitt is fighting a war against them, that bloke from ‘This Life” is walking with them and we’ve all been shooting them in their thousands on our Xbox’s for years now. So what’s different here? I will tell you.
State of Decay is an open world zombie survival game. The PC mod game Day Z is a real influence here in it’s ethos of survival management. There is also as a sprinkle of GTA, THE SIMS and THE WALKING DEAD thrown in. You start right in the thick of the action, where you and a friend are instantly being attacked by a group of zombies. You’ve been away from the news of the outbreak by camping in the wilderness together. I couldn’t get Brokeback Mountain out of my head when playing these first few minutes. As you survive the attack you make your way to a ranger station and then the story begins.
Straight away in the first hour I noticed that the game is very glitchy. The framerate shudders and the textures pop in and out frequently. There are times when characters appear without weapons or just plain get stuck in a bush. PLEASE don’t let that put you off. Keep calm and carry on. There has been a recent patch that seems to have dealt with a lot of these problems.
The game follows the rules of a traditional role-playing game. Your character starts of average and a little bit weedy. You run out of breath quite quickly (like me in real life) when running from danger. Your health is quickly lost and taking zombies down can be slow. Soon though you gain skills quickly, like fighting, cardio (running), wits (Searching), leadership and Shooting. You upgrade these skills by simply doing these things well throughout the game. You can switch between different characters as you meet them or rescue them in the game. Then you can level them up by making them lead missions while giving your other character a breather to heal and gain stamina. . The SIM part of the game covers the gaining of outposts and then fortifying it for the upcoming zombie attacks. Do you buy extra sleeping quarters for the survivors or buy a research library for better weapons and facilities. The choice is yours and there is no right or wrong answer here.
The currency in the game is Influence points. You get points by killing zombies, completing missions, finding food and supplies etc. You use these points carefully to upgrade weapons or building workshops/research centers in your outpost, as well as making life-changing decisions regarding the order to your band of survivors. You need to keep morale up within your team, juggle friendships by listening to their stories and desperately trying not to lose to many survivors.
Now here’s where it get interesting. You build your first character up from the start, leveling up, establishing trusting friendships and collecting your salvage. Then you’re alone on a mission, searching for supplies and you make to much noise. One Zombie appears, and then another and very quickly a hoard of Zombies are ripping you apart (there’s an achievement for this), then your dead. That’s it. There’s not going back, the death is forever. Permanent. The game switches you to one of the other players you can control and if you haven’t leveled them up at the same time it back to square one. Your remains, equipment stay where you fell and the first decision you make is to consider whether it is worth going back to retrieve it all from the perilously dangerous area you just died in.
I love this feature. It makes every step you make in the game a significant one. Every decision is crucial and you don’t just rush into the zombies headlong swinging a bat, but instead try and work out your plan of attack carefully. I restarted the game from the beginning a couple of times after my main character died on mountain rescue mission 6 hours in. I had grown quite attached and couldn’t stand taking on another person, so started from the beginning again. I don’t recommend this course of action. You will die a lot, so just suck it up, have a little cry and move on to another character.
The zombies in question are a mixed bag. From lone stragglers who you can pick off quite easy, too the roaming hoards who attack fast and furiously. You can fight with a range of melee weapons from planks of wood to sharp axes. Personally I like a good wrench. These weapons take damage the more you use them, until they eventually break. You then rapidly find yourselves searching around in an abandoned house nervously for something new to hit with, while the zombies smash through the windows. There are guns, but these and the ammo so runs out. When you do fire a gun and blow off an undead's head, the noise attracts hoards of the brain eaters from all around quickly resulting in a your running away.
Another way of dealing and running away from the undead is cars. There are a number of vehicles spread around this large map. The cars are great for traveling between missions over large distances of the map. They are also a lot of fun for mowing down large groups of zombies. The attack where you open the door mid driving to take a zombie down is especially satisfying. Beware though the noise of the car again attracts more of them and can lead to a massive attack on your outpost as they follow you back.CONCLUSION
State of Decay is a fantastic game and I know I will be playing this all over the summer. I have put into it already around 10 hours and there are huge areas that I haven’t explored yet. There is a lot to do in terms of SIM management, RPG and stealth/fighting. For some the combination might be too daunting and they might give up on the first day. I would urge you again to keep going with this little gem of a game, which is very refreshing from what we are used to in a zombie game. The replay value is wonderful and you can attack the mission in a number of different ways each time. The big thing for me is the price, which is just 1600 Microsoft points. This beats hands down in quality a lot of fully priced games I wouldn’t want to mention here. The developers are already talking about taking this game model onto the XBOX ONE. I would love it to see it with online survivors that you have to join up with to build an outpost. Playing co- op online with friends dusting down Zombies together would be the sweetest icing on the cake to a game that is refreshing, enjoyable and really worthwhile.
The Lost Island
