QCF: State of Decay

ver the last five years, zombie survival has become its own sub-genre. From first-person shooters such as Left 4 Dead and third-person action games including Dead Rising, zombies have been used in many different forms. Love it or hate it, the zombie as an enemy type is here to stay. State of Decay attempts to focus more on the survival aspect of the genre, while many parts of the game gets in the way of greatness, what state of decay does accomplish is something that you would normally only find in those flash games on Kongregate. And to be honest, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

You begin State of Decay as Marcus and his buddy Ed, who arrive at a camp from a fishing trip and are immediately attacked by the undead. While there is an overarching narrative through the game, I probably could not tell you what it was, and I just finished playing it. The most interesting part is all of the characters that you meet and recruit. Each have their own abilities, history and personality quirks. Each character tends to have a unique personality, and will go off on missions by themselves and do their own thing whether you want to or not (more on that later). No matter which character you are playing as, the main narrative continues so as long as you have playable characters.

The main reason why I don’t remember the story is because of how the game actually plays. After the initial tutorial, you become part of a camp. While doing this, you'll make decisions determining what facilities you will build, be it a medical tent to help heal injuries and sickness or a bed area to provide bonus stamina. You will also need to scout for packs of supplies such as food and ammo, and determine whether to bring new people into the fold. The personality quirks of characters tend to matter since people will argue and start spreading fear, which will affect you groups morale. Managing the group becomes a central focus in the game.

State of Decay is also an open world endeavor, and be it that this game is only $20, the size of the world is fairly large considering. With two or three small towns, a larger city and lots of farm land and swamps you will have many areas to explore. Every building can be entered, and you can exhaust the supplies within a town, which might require you to pick up your group and move to a new area with fresh houses to loot. All of this is done while either avoiding zombies, which come in multiple varieties as well as wandering hordes. Moreover, you will want to make sure you pay attention to your group mates, because if they become friends with you, you will gain them as extra characters to swap out in case those you're already playing with either get injured or killed. 

With combat, your main focus will be on stealth, as even your running footsteps will make noise, which is indicated by a circle originating from you on the mini map, which can draw any zombie in the area. If you draw in a considerable number, you will not have the stamina to handle it, as the bar dwindles with every single swing of your pipe/bat/sword. While guns are also available, and you can have certain characters specialize in them, they are almost always used as a last resort. Unless you build suppressers, the guns are extremely loud, as gun tends to be, and it’s guaranteed to draw ten plus zeds to your location. As you use melee weapons, guns, and other abilities, you will also gain experience, similar to how you would level up abilities in Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, meaning that you will have these characters that you have kept alive for a long time and they are high level. When they die, it is simply heartbreaking, as it is permanent.

And now we come to the issues within State of Decay. The game has a horde of technical problems: Enemies teleport through walls, clip through walls, phase through the floor, and more. The Frame rate also takes a major hit whenever you use a vehicle to traverse the world. Supplies that you drop may fall through a floor, leaving the icon on your map but the item being impossible to pick up. Patches have been released frequently to try and tighten these things up, but problems still pop up. The A.I. for the companions you call to pick up supplies is also damn near suicidal, as they will choose a straight path to a destination, they will not use stealth and, as such, will attract every zombie in the area like a car alarm, turning every instance of calling for a supply pick up into an escort mission, as there is a 75 percent chance that whichever character is sent will die.  

While these technical problems are frequent, they aren't game breaking, and didn’t spoil my enjoyment of the title. The teleporting enemy only happened to me twice in my 15 hour playthrough, and whenever a zombie clips through a wall they stop moving, making them easy targets.

The biggest deal breaker is the games use of real world time. If you leave any of your companions missing and you turn off your game for a couple days, there is a chance that they'll be dead when you return, even if they're healthy and in your group; there's always a possibility of a random injury or death. Case in point, I stopped playing the game for two days. When I came back, three of my group members died, two went missing, one was injured, and I had lost a quarter of my supplies.

What the fuck? None of this is explained in the tutorial section of the game, and there is little you can do to prevent this unless you make sure to wait for the random mission to find missing persons when any of this happens. After that, make sure you have plenty of supplies and that everyone has perfect health, meaning that if you are strapped for time you could possibly go to work and come home to a completely different camp than you had when you left.

Technical problems aside, if you can get over the "random loss while away" aspect, State of Decay has a lot to offer for its $20 budget. You can probably blow through the game in eight hours, but I fell into the group management aspect of it for an additional seven. The developers are patching in a sandbox mode and updates arrive frequently to fix the technical issues, so this game is a different beast week to week. If the game had a co-op mode, this would be the closest that consoles this generation will get to a Day-Z like experience. The group management and inventory systems drew me in and wouldn’t let me go. It’s a fresh take on the Zombie Survival genre and is worth a look from any horror fan.