By Jeremy Hannaford (Contributor) – Email
Print Edition: July 3, 2013
Before the fiasco of Microsoft’s Xbox One post-E3 changes, they released a game developed by Undead Labs. Despite all the attention and praise some zombie games have received, I have found that none have been able to keep my attention for more than a few hours. What’s been missing from games like Left 4 Dead or Dead Island was a literal survival atmosphere. What I’ve wanted to see in a zombie game was the idea of having to scavenge for resources and living with the consequences of depleting local zones. I wanted to have a world where every bullet was sacred and I would go out on several missions and return without ever firing a shot. That is exactly what State of Decay delivers.
The game jumps right out the gate with you being attacked by zombies. And these zombies are tough. You can’t just run into a horde like in Capcom’s Dead Rising. Taking on two zombies at a time can be challenging, let alone a horde – you have to use your wits to conserve your stamina and ammo.
Early in the game, you discover a local church that is taking refugees. You begin to provide for the community by scavenging for supplies, weapons and vehicles. The game doesn’t give you one single character but a plethora to choose from. With every survivor you encounter and save, they represent another character to control. This means that no one character is essentially different from each other in terms of story advancement. The only difference is their level of skill in which the player can improve upon through use.
Of course, one would think that staying with one character throughout the game would be the best option. I thought this as well until I discovered that by not using the other characters, I wasn’t training them. State of Decay has some simple RPG elements with skill leveling and yes or no scenarios. Cardio, fighting and weapons are some of the main skills a player needs to increase in the survivor if they want them to survive on their own. If you don’t, you will be forced to save them quite often on zombie hunts. After a while this gets annoying and forces you to go after them even if it repeatedly prevents you from continuing storyline quests.
Undead Labs did a great job of trying to put as much detail into their game as possible. One of the most interesting things is the fact that the town has an everlasting memory. Cars never move from where you leave them, houses remain empty after you have ransacked them. In doing so, it makes you have to go farther and farther out to find more resources. Eventually, you may be forced to move your base to another location. Even when you leave the game, supplies will dwindle until you return. While all of these aspects sound great, it becomes very complicated when you are faced with these options for the first time. State of Decay has a steep learning curve with both its survival gameplay and its user interface (UI). When you want to build on your home, you will have to navigate through a complicated interface and find out what you can build and what you need to build them. Also, the away-from-game clock is very harsh. Not even 24 hours later, and my well-stocked food storage was empty!
In addition to heavy frame-rate issues, the AI can be quite troubling. As said before, the other survivors will need your help if you don’t train them, but sometimes they just makes stupid decisions. They will want to trade ammo for food despite the fact that you have tons of food but no ammo. The AI-controlled also survivors cannot drive a car so when you want them to scavenge an area far from the base, don’t expect to see them for some time as they will be hoofing it. An unfortunate issue that comes with having multiple survivors to use is that they become assets rather than characters. Another odd issue is that people are quite friendly. Barely anyone is suspicious and those who even seem suspicious aren’t really all that bad. The concept of people being worse than the monsters would have been interesting, but it is absent in State of Decay.
But when it all boils down, you are getting far more than one would bargain for with an arcade title. State of Decay gives a realistic survival feel and, despite the fact that everyone is a nice guy, the apocalypse holds nothing back. This was Undead Labs’ test for trying to build a massively multi-player online (MMO) version of the game; one I would be very interested to see. With a realistic survival system and compelling battles against the undead, State of Decay is the first zombie apocalypse game that actually got the zombie apocalypse idea down solid.
