Review: State of Decay

State of Decay is Undead Labs’ first game to come out of their Seattle-based studio, and wow, have they come out swinging. The game’s open world sandbox style gameplay is coupled with content that changes in real-time with your actions. The premise of the game is relatively simple: in the midst of a zombie apocalypse, you’re to find a home base and set up defences. In charge of the minute details of your survivors and your defences, you’re to dig in and try to take back your town whilst working with the local government (which is in disarray, of course) and helping the army to uncover just how the zombie uprising started.

The game starts off as you and your friend return home from a hunting trip only to find that you have stumbled upon a group of fellow campers who are all sick and clearly mad (so basically, like the start of every zombie movie ever). After fending off these madmen, it clicks that something is not right at all and a nearby Ranger station is going to be the best way to get some answers. Once there, you are introduced to some of the more clever features of State of Decay: you can climb certain structures and survey the land looking for points of interest, Assassins Creed-style.

With its third person perspective, State of Decay has still managed to find a way to have zombies stay out of your field of vision until they are upon you, not only reacting to sight but noise. This results in a requirement to always be on-guard and move carefully. Your character can speed through sections by holding down the left bumper, but that results in a louder movements. Trust me, having a Bloater zombie surprise you whilst looting medical supplies means that extra speed isn’t worth it.

Side missions are abundant in State of Decay, and chief among those are finding additional survivors to rescue. Escort missions are coupled with the task of finding more resources to bring back to the safe house to keep your troop happy and healthy. Your safe house is where the game really shines, rolling the game into another genre. It’s akin to that of The Sims, with that same vibe of maintaining, building and upgrading rooms, setting people to work and micro-managing your time and resources. Throughout your treks, you will also find empty buildings which you may set up as outposts. Those outposts generate resources and allow you to set up of traps to dispatch the zombie hordes.

As you progress through the game, you’ll rescue more and more people to add to your family of fellow apocalypse hunters. That provides for a real RPG feel as you can switch between any survivor at any point from your safe house. This system allows survivors the chance to rest as you build up the stats of a fellow comrade. The more you use a specific character, the more they learn and level up stats for whichever task they’re involved in. If you belt a zombie, you’ll increase your melee stat. If you use guns, you’ll level up your shooting. All these skills will help each survivor to function independently when you’re not using them. A good shooter will double as a great lookout, for instance.

As great as your fellow survivors are (especially if you level them up), an AI-controlled survivor on a fetch quest usually means you’ll have to go and rescue them. That’s one of my main gripes about State of Decay: 90% of the time, AI-controlled characters have super-buggy orienteering and combat scripting.

State of Decay is a refreshing micromanagement third-person RPG that gets most of it right. There’s room for tweaks and improvements, and I hope Undead Labs revisit this world to implement those in the future.