State of Decay

 


State of Decay Was Great… Until ONE Thing Ruined It

State of Decay is almost a great zombie survival game.
It has base building, survivor management, permadeath-style character swapping, cars, looting, and a surprisingly deep open world.
For the first few hours, I thought I had found one of the coolest zombie games I’d missed.

But then the game did something insane: the main missions just stopped appearing.
Not once. Not twice. For hours.
I was driving in circles, doing filler quests, restarting the game, literally waiting for the campaign to continue.

So this is one of the weirdest reviews I’ve done: a game I genuinely liked… that also felt broken by design.




State of Decay is basically Grand theft auto but in  zombie apocalypse. I didnt know thats what I was getting myself into but thats almost what it turned out to be. The game starts off, with no difficulty selection, and not even an intro cutscene or anything. You and a friend are suddenly ambushed by some zombies at a lake. There is an event log, that shows notable events, and even a sort of diary before the game even started, but thats it, not much else story. I actually like the minimal storytelling and getting into the game fast. Before long you arrive at a ranger station and here is where the game shows off its mechanics.

You have a main base, where you can open a menu and upgrade various aspects of it. More on this later, at first theres not much you can do. You have allies who occupy the base with you, and you can interact with them although theres not much you can say or do with them besides asking them to follow you.

This game is largely about roaming an open world, doing randomly generated repeatable side quests, and also doing important main missions when they appear. My first impression of the combat is that it reminded me of Dead Rising, not just the combat but the aspect of saving survivors and having to escort them back to your base. That's not a bad thing, Dead Rising is a great game, so I was excited to see other games with similar mechanics. The melee combat is very simple, you mostly just press a single button to melee attack, although later on I realized if you hold sprint and attack you do a different animation, but still its very basic. The melee is mostly about stunning the enemies before they grab and stun you, so I preferred to use lighter weapons such as blades rather than big two handed weapons. You also have to manage your stamina, when it drains it leaves you very vulnerable, you can also eat food with the press of a button to regain stamina or health. It works well enough, and your melee weapons also have durability and can degrade and break. But if you store them in your stash at the base, you can slowly repair them over time, which is a well designed mechanic since it makes you utilize your different resources.

The graphics are initially  slightly cartoony, but actually still decent looking considering its a 2013 game. Theres lots of tasteful use of color, hazy blue and purple mist and fog and nice colors throughout the game. Theres decent reflections , shadows, and specular effects, and the zombies look threatening enough, although a tad too cartoony. The worst issue is the games not optimized very well, even on any system, to where you can see tons of pop-in especially when driving, as well as stuttering, but its not that big of a deal.

Guns are similarly quite simplistic, ammo is relativiely limited although you can trade for ammo at other survivor bases using the currency known as Influence, you usually only take like 30 to 60 bullets with you at a time as inventory space is limited, which is something I enjoyed.

But the ranger station segment is a short lived prelude, everyone there dies and you quickly head south to the real start of the game.

Then you show up to a base at a church in a small town, its reminiscent of Season 2 of The Walking Dead, the farmyard with Hershell and the pastor. Its a nice mix of inspirations, Dead Rising, The Walking Dead, GTA, and even a bit of The Sims with managing your base and its resources and NPC's. The main NPC who talks to you over the radio and assigns missions is Lily, and you hear from her a lot.

At this part the game is quite freeform. You roam around the town, bringing up the games Map and selecting missions to go towards. Theres no easy way to tell whats a side mission and whats a main mission. But your main base has stats to care about, such as food supplies, ammo reserves, Fuel, medicine, and Construction materials which determine the status of your base signified by a resource bar. NPC's can also become sad or get in disputes, needing to manage them, giving The Sims influence feeling. So doing randomly generated side quests to bring back resources is beneficial and actually satisfying, you can find survivors to take with you and permanently unlock in your base.

Before long you discover the unique and interesting mechanic the game has up its sleeve that sets it apart from most other similar zombie games. Theres a "friend" system, where if you build relations and influence enough with NPC's in your base, you then befriend them and can play as them. You are able to swap in and out of any of your friends whenever you want, they continue going about their life without you, going on runs, you can radio them to come take stuff youve found, all sorts of cool things. Even more exciting is that each survivor has their own set of unique traits and perks, stats, and you can upgrade each of them individually to specialize in different areas. One person can be the dedicated melee guy, the other a skilled sharpshooter that can slow down time with a perk, stuff like that. Some characters even have silly or humorous traits Such as "Loved Reality show trivia" or "Online shopper" with their own joke skills for flavour. This made each NPC feel unique and worth paying attention to, because sadly theres not much dialogue or interaction with them otherwise. The upgrades are basic, the more you do things, the more they level up. Run around a lot, cardio goes up, and thus so does sprint. Melee a lot, and melee goes up. Shoot a lot, guns increase. Then at certain thresholds you get to pick permanent perks and you get to pick a specialization. Some of these perks change the way the game plays, like you can unlock a slow motion ability if your shooting is high enough and you spec into shooting for instance. Its pretty basic stuff, but it again adds things to look forward to and build towards and added another dimension to the game.

But theres more. There is permadeath. If an NPC dies, they are gone for good. This raises the stakes and makes you really care and be locked in as youre playing. Its an engaging and clever design choice that I appreciate, it made the game much more intense and interesting. Although the first time this happened it took me by surprise and made me a bit butthurt cause I didnt know, but I got over it. I only had a single character die the entire game, so its not like its a hard game really, but it has just the right touches to make you care and actually be engrossed in whats happening.

The neat thing is the game forces you to switch between characters too, you cant really just play as one character for the entire game because they get either Tired or Hurt status. The only way to get rid of these debuffs, which ruin your stamina, is to swap to another character and wait for them to go to sleep or go to an infirmary. So youre heavily incentivized to gear up and upgrade multiple characters, it works well but one gripe I have is that pretty much everyone you can befriend always starts off with trash stats, so its a bit contradictory, if you want me to play as these other people, at least let me find some people that start off with decently high combat stats instead of all one stars. The only person I found with good starter stats was the mandatory person you get in the beginning of the game, Maya, she starts off with almost maxed out shooting and a unique shooting perk, so I felt like I had to play as her for most of the game since shes already so good.

The inventory UI, and itemization is also a fun aspect of the game. By default you can only carry 6 slots, and you cant even drop items but instead you must destroy them if you arent putting them in your main stash. You can find different backpacks such as a Large Backpack to increase it to 8 slots. And besides the slots, each item has a corresponding weight, so a big sledgehammer can weigh you down more than a knife, and even if your slots arent full you can still be overencumbered if you carry too high weight. This is another strategic and fun part of the game, balancing out your loadout but also being able to efficiently loot. The UI is okay, its stylized in a unique way, everything has the same color which maybe makes things look a bit too samey, but it works well enough.

As you complete missions, and do various things in the world, you gain Influence. Influence is a sort of currency you spend at bases to trade, as well as taking things out of your own base. When you put things away in the base stash, you get influence. And withdrawing items also costs a certain amount of influence, so its also a balancing act of figuring out where to spend this currency and when to deposit. For instance buying ammo at neighbouring bases costs more than taking it from your main bases stash. All of this comes together to add depth, strategy, and complexity to the game that is much appreciated.

Theres lots of loot and items to find, too. The game has a surprisingly impressive amount of weapon diversity. Theres tons of different melee weapons, and a staggering amount of guns too. Each with their own stats and abilities. Different ammo types corresponding to how powerful a gun may be, similar to real life. You need to carefully decide which type of ammo you will take with it depending on how dangerous you may expect it to get. Although for most of the game I just ended up using this SKS rifle, it used powerful 7.62 rounds, always could find enough ammo, and it had a 10 round magazine with no bolt action so it shot fast enough. I didnt see much point in using automatic rifles since its a resource management game I don't want to just spray and pray. You mostly loot houses, parts of the house glow which are lootable containers, it does a timer that you can speed up if you hold a button at the cost of making more noise and attracting zombies, then you find individual items or you find big container items which you can carry on your back as a rucksack, like materials, food, medical supplies etc, you can load items into cars and then park the car in front of the main base to automatically deposit resources to the base. Each time theres a silly radio message from Lily "Whatcha got?" , and the character always replying in a whimsical manner "Oh you know....Stuff" , which is very dumb, but kinda charming and amusing.

There's cars all over the place, and they get an icon on your minimap. The driving is polished enough, things don't feel too floaty or too arcadey, the driving is solid but at times the physics can be wonky , the game has definite amounts of jank, sometimes you can hit a tiny pebble on the ground and flip the entire car over flying into the air destroying it for instance. But still, lots of car varieties, a surprising amount considering the kind of game it is, Trucks, SUV's, Taxi's, police cars, sports cars, jeeps, and the like. You can even repair vehicles at your base. Theres a funny and satisfying mechanic where you can hold the fire button to open your car door and use it as sort of a weapon, because if you just ram enemies directly with your vehicle it will damage it rapidly, but if you use your car door it doesnt seem to damage the vehicle quite as much, so it creates this entertaining mechanic where you try to carefully position your car to hit the enemies with the door, its the most effective way to mow down zombies in the whole game it felt like.

The game world is decently sized, theres a few main cities, a big spawling countryside that wraps around and connects them, big open farm fields to drive through, its not a massive game like others in the genre, I felt like it was the right size, but theres not really any memorable locations or landmarks, its a lot of the same generic little towns and some highways to connect them. Its alright.

There is a game has a day and night cycle and its very longwinded. Night time seems to last for hours in real life time, and day time feels shorter. Night time is more dangerous it seems too, more zombies and theyre more aggressive. Shooting your gun is often a bad idea because it seems to just instnatly spawn zombies around you no matter what, infact a gripe I have with the game is many times it feels like zombies are just never ending and spawning nonstop in your vicinity rather than you organically stunmbling upon many zombies, they feel like they just keep spawning ontop of you.

Zombies are mostly standard what you would expect, also some Left 4 Dead influence in the different types, you have one that jumps ontop of you called Feral Zombie, you have a big one called the Juggernaut which is very tanky, another one thats fat and explodes with steaming bile, other ones that wear SWAT gear, but thats pretty much eat. Not too great, but not bad, works well enough.

But for the first few hours of the game things were quite enjoyable going around doing little tasks, meet this survivor group here, save this person there and bring them back to your base like Dead Rising, your friend at the church base gets sick and you have to go get medicine for him, the pastor gets sick and dies, you sometimes have infected NPC's that you have to take out back and kill them, its engaging and fun and you want to know what happens next. You meet a nefarious neighboring group called the Wilkersons which are like hillbillies on a farm, and you have a few run ins with the army.

But sadly the enjoyment at times grinded to a hault. The game has a really baffling and annoying flaw and design choice. Main missions simply do not spawn. Its not like in GTA where you can just drive to some location and constantly do the next main mission. In this game its more like, you go do a main mission, and then theres no more on the map. You have no idea what will trigger the next one or when it will show up. At first this started happening and I wasn't aware of it since its hard to tell whats a main mission or not, so I would just keep doing the same handful of randomly generated copy paste side quests over and over, like go here and take out this zombie, or go there and help this ally, stuff like that. But eventually I realized that the damn main missions are just not spawning.

I started Googling around and it turns out its a very common problem everyone has with this game.  Seems like everyone has moments where they just have no idea how to progress and theyre just aimlessly roaming in circles with nothing happening, either thinking their game is broken or not knowing what to do. Infact early around the games launch, people complained so much that the devs started asking people to send them in their own save file data so they  can analyze it and try to fix the problem. Well now its over a decade later and the same problem exists. The games main missions just feel broken half the time and never appear. What a rediculous issue to have for a game. How do you make a game where your main campaign just doesnt show up? Did they do it on purpose to prevent you from beating the game too fast or what? Either way it totally sucks.

Towards the end of the game it got to the point where I hadn't seen a main mission for hours on end, just twiddling my thumbs, or doing dozens of the same side quests over and over, or even just alt tabbing and leaving the game running waiting for something to happen. I mean what the fuck? I found out that it seemed like if I just quit the game, and then launch it again, I would sometimes instantly get the next main mission to appear. Its just totally broken bullshit. It should not be like a damn miracle just to get the next mission to appear so I can progress the game. Its so sad, I was having fun with the game until this started happening.

At one point you get suggested to move your main base, so you scout around and can move your base almost anywhere you want, which was a cool feature. I just put it down south in the next major city, at some big warehouse complex. This place appeared to give the most possible slots for things to build, like a place to train NPC's, a place to build exta storage, infirmary, sleeping areas, you can even build a library and research center, to do things like craft ammo but I never was able to do that, theres only so much space you have to build stuff. Still its cool how much stuff you can build and upgrade.

But after going down south and progressing further the game really just started to drip feed main missions to you, it got really boring at a point and annoying.
Another gripe is that many of the questlines simply revolve around these other bands of survivors, but they all feel anti-climactic or half assed and do not go anywhere. You have a few missions with these people at a courthouse, a judge and a sherrif, but its only 3 missions and then they just abruptly die and thats it, no one even mentions it or talks about it after, no cutscene, nothing. It just felt pointless and unfinished. There afformentioned Wilkerson missions similarly dont really go anywhere, you go back and forth negotiating with them doing fetch quests then it just wraps up where you either say yes to side with them or not and I said yes, you escort some group to them then leave, if you go back later you find this groups belongings on the ground implying they were killed...and thats it. No cutscene or anything to tie up the storyline , its awkward.

Theres another storyline involving the Grange people, this punk rock girl and her friends, turns out she used to be a prostitute and she was hiding it from her now boyfriend, you can either tell him or not, and if you tell him she ends up dying, and thats also pretty much it. These subplots dont really go anywhere or really offer much to the main story at all, it comes across as almost pointless busywork to try to add SOMETHING to the game, rather disappointing main missions really.

The last group of missions are army related missions and they are similarly underwhelming, half of them arent even missions at all its just going and talking to this guy and thats the entire thing. Only two of them are even notable, one is defending a few soldiers as they blow up a bridge wall, another you go inside this base and raid it which was probably the best mission in the game, another you help them at some farm.

But still, throughout many of these I would have moments where the next main mission would just not spawn, I was livestreaming my playthrough and at times I would just walk away from my computer and do nothing waiting for something to happen, its so bad. Especially the army missions, the last handful of army missions just DID NOT want to spawn for me, it took hours. Eventually after restarting the game over and over, roaming around, doing endless side quests, cleairng infestations that spawn around the map, they miraculously started spawning.

I do the last few army missions, and the final missioon is just a defense mission on a bridge where the guy plants another explosive at a barrier and sacrifices himself as you protect him. Game finished, end credits. Super anticlimactic missions in general that rarely go anywhere and even the ending missions of the game felt very underwhelming. If you try to play after the credits it just takes you back before the last mission. I guess you can keep playing to go find more survivors or fully upgrade your base and find more loot but yeah not much point.

This "Year one survival edition" (also the only edition you can buy nowadays) comes with all DLC. A breakdown mode, which appears to just be a survive as long as possible mode, and another Lifeline mode which is another separate campaign, that I will maybe play one day.

Thats State of Decay. It was fun until the main missions started being a complete chore to even unlock. Its such a crazy design choice, did they intend it to be like this? Why is it like this? The game would of been significantly better if it did not have this issue, but even with it, I still had a decent time overall, it is a unique experience with the base management, playing as any NPC swapping in and out with their own perks and traits, interesting loot, with an open world including lots off vehicles and zombies, saving survivors was fun although the AI can be frustrating - its sad the game somehow managed to shoot its self in the foot and manage to screw it up a bit.

6/10