Let’s Review: State of Decay

Let’s Review: State of Decay

This game takes place in a secluded small country town called Turnbull Valley. Your goal is to escape the valley. The valley is a giant zombie filled sandbox. The sandbox is full of a wide variety of characters. Your group will encounter the redneck gun running Wilkersons, “The Law” the surviving police officers lead by a judge who will say “We live in a society”, and the military who are only concerned for containment of the zombies at all costs.

There are a lot of fun jobs to do in the sandbox. Sometimes you’ll be going on hunts to kill special zombies. Other times you’ll be looking for missing people, some of whom will even join your group. All of the buildings have supplies in them that you’ll need for your survival. You’ll get strange messages from an entity called “Cleo” leading you to air dropped supplies. These crates are surrounded by zombies but contain some amazing weapons and supplies. But the run is you won't have time to do everything. Its like Dead Rising on roids. There isn’t a major repercussions for missing the non-story missions except to your group’s reputation.

There are some cool places to explore, such as a truck stop themed like Jurassic Park, and crashed passenger plane. Some areas can be turned into bases. Your base can be upgraded and customized. Libraries can be used for research. Sleeping areas help your group get some sleep and rest. A kitchen to help prepare some food. Gardens help grow food. Workshops help fix your cars and weapons. As well as watchtowers for guards to snipe zombies that get too close to your base. Buildings can be transformed into outposts to create a buffer zone between your base and the zombie hordes.

State of Decay plays like a mix of GTA and a Dead Rising clone. The game finds its own spirit with the cast of characters. The game sports an RPG element in character development. Characters have different skills like weapon specialization or the ability to search areas quietly. When a character dies, they are gone and you’ll have to play as another. Death has some game play elements to it. If you have an explosive device you can pull the pin and go out like a badass space marine. In this way the characters function as “lives.” I really connected with the initial group and ended up playing most of the game with them or you can get ripped in half in gory detail.

Cars control is decent. But be careful going off road. Cars can flip tip pretty easy. If the car tips everyone gets ejected, which can result in damage. The concept doesn't make much sense. Wouldn’t the passengers have to crawl out of the wreck after it lands?

Every car feels different and control differently giving them they’re own personality of a sort.. Like with people when a car is destroyed its gone for good. Pickups are slower, have wide turning radiuses. But the pickup trucks have more storage space making them perfect for clearing loot from lots of buildings quickly. Sport cars are fast and are good for getting to objectives and missions when time is short. But they have less space for storage.

The cars look different, but I found a few duplicates in the wild. The cars look really cool, such as the badass Army Pickup Truck, the Jurassic Park SUV and good old fashioned American muscle cars.

Driving through the farmland full speed splattering zombies is lots of fun. However, watch out for the fences. That rotten wood fence will hold firm like a concrete impact barrier in front of a German Christmas Market. You can open your car door and hit a zombie with with. (Little details like this that make driving around the sandbox so much fun.) Zombies can also jump onto your car and you’ll have to shake them off.

The story plays with expectations established by other zombie apocalypse media. One of the characters early on gets bitten, you expect this to be a death sentence. But they pull through and it turns out the sickness was in the water supply and anyone can turn. Paranoia spreads among the survivors.

The game is fun. But the side quests end abruptly. The court house gets overrun randomly. What happened is never really explained. Did a civilian get sick and turn attacking the unarmed population? Did a hole emerge in a fence somewhere? Did supplies run out?

You run odd jobs for the Wilkersons. One of the jobs is to look over a “deal.” The whole thing ends with the gunrunners killing the survivors and the quest just ends. No explanations for why or comeuppance for the Wilkersons. It would have been fun to end the quest line with a Dead Rising style boss fight to mix up the enemy types.

There are a few different Zombie types beyond the “walker” default. One type is an armored zombie. The tank zombie is a fat zombie with massive amounts of health and strength. They have a close range ground pound and a quick charge attack to close the range. The bloater is a zombie that will explode when they get close to you resulting in an area of attack poison cloud that will damage you over time. Screamers are armless zombies with a stun scream attack. They can be found in infestations. Those stun attacks are deadly when combined with a horde of zombies in close quarters. And the Feral zombie is a fast strong zombie built with a lot of muscles. One flaw about the zombies is while there are lots of zombie types, they all look the same.

I played on a basic Xbox One. I noticed some frame rate chugs in the towns that were populated with lots of stuff, especially when speeding through in a car. I saw a few graphical bugs in the animations. One time I walked into my base and someone was pulling a Ghostbusters sleeping a few feet above the bed. In the mission where you are defending the Wilkerson house from zombies the zombies will get stuck under the house.

So in closing thoughts. I only played the base game. I can’t comment on the DLC’s. The game hosts 2 DLC packs. I got this game as a part of my Game Pass subscription. This game was a lot of fun to play. I enjoyed the subplots and I felt a link and bond with the cast of characters. This game was worth the time I spent with it. If you have Game Pass, give this title a play. If all else give this game a rent.