So I finally got round to completing State of Decay. This will contain spoilers but the story is so cliched and poorly executed that I personally don’t think it matters. I also need to mention I played the original release rather than the remastered version, but from reviews it suggests that the remastered version was more a graphical patch.

Atmosphere:

The main strength is that it creates the atmosphere of the zombie apocalypse perfectly. Large empty urban areas swarming with zombies just waiting for you to make a loud noise to suddenly fill the streets.

The one aspect the game captures perfectly

The atmosphere is improved through the day and night cycle. I made the mistake of presuming the zombies were stronger at night at first but actually they were only more dangerous as they were much harder to spot.

Game mechanics and issues.

The game uses an interesting mechanical approach of third person combat with shelter management game play.

Your key role is to go out, explore, harvest resources and bring them back to the shelter. Collect construction materials to build new rooms to unlock additional perks. Meet new people and recruit them to the shelter. You need to keep the group happy… Not sure what happens if you fail to do that as it turned out to be very easy to manage with a bit of scavenging.

Unfortunately, this is where we hit a key problem with the game design. The other survivors essentially give you side quests that increase moral or potentially the loss of a survivor if you fail to help. These included:

Somebody is angry (Completed by walking to a nearby building and killing a few zombies then escorting them back)

Somebody is sad (same as before)

Distraction request (easiest of the side quests as it tell you to go somewhere and make noise for example sounding the horn of your car)

Ally in trouble (Go save an ally from a swarm of zombies)

Special zombie hunt (Kill a special zombie)

These become very repetitive and your left wondering when the next story mission will pop up.

Sure keeping people happy and gathering materials to keep the shelter maintained is important, but the design of these mechanics is very shallow. There is no conflict between the other survivors to manage. This is handled much better in the Dead State, but it has the opposite problem where it basically requires you to dump all your skill points into leadership and diplomacy or your shelter will fall apart around you.

The permadeath mechanic also means that the vast majority of survivors are undeveloped as you may end up using them to continue the game. They get small text backstories like “Ran away from home” and that is it. You can switch between characters but I generally only used two that I would switch between. This makes more sense as you can max out both of their skill sets rather than switching between low level characters.

The story

The permadeath mechanic is one of the reasons why the story of State of Decay is so awful. Any playable character can do any mission with the exception of a single mission where it is best to send Maya to talk to the military. Even then you can do it with anyone else and get told to go away, but the plot continues anyway so no loss.

As the story missions need to be accessible with any character they are pretty broadly written and awful. There are three story mission sets that stick in my mind.

The Courthouse:

Mission 1: Go chat to the people in the courthouse… brave new world based on justice. I did wonder if it was building up to conflict with other survivors, as the zombies were posing little threat by this point, but no that is not a feature in the game.

Mission 2: Help the sheriff kill a feral zombie (if you had done any of the kill a freak side quests it is basically that with a few more buildings to search).

Mission 3: Defend whats left of the courthouse. The characters (the judge and the sheriff) are both dead and it turns into another neutral survivor shelter.

That is it. Not particularly enjoyable and just ends.

The Wilkersons story:

This contains more missions than the previous, but even worse writing. Essentially after you help them out you get some odd missions. Drive someone home etc. Basically the game essentially makes it crystal clear they are murdering and robbing other survivors in the valley. You presume it is building up to a conflict as they seem to be threatening your shelter, but no… The last mission actually made me laugh.

Neutral observer:

Pick up three random survivors and drive them to a trade meeting with the Wilkersons Leave the area Get the message the three people you dropped off just died and mission complete.

So they were murdered you could drive back to see their corpses. That is the side missions for the Wilkersons complete. I presume that conflict with other survivors was planned but never implemented. Rather central to the zombie genre really and a bit of a weird oversight.

Other forms of media and games natural focus on conflict between groups as its more interesting.

They do add special zombies over time. Basically the special zombies from Left 4 Dead with a bloater that explodes, the feral, the tank, etc. These are meant to increase challenge, but I generally found the game surprisingly easy. If they had included the threat from other survivors it may have made the game much more challenging.

The final set of missions – the military:

Again standard zombie tropes the military are useless but very effective at blocking off the game exit and part of the map for a while.

Honestly, not sure how the military struggled so much when a guy driving a car and armed with an axe could take down hordes of the undead, but it is a standard zombie story trope.

Pretty much how to survive this zombie apocalypse in a nutshell

These missions are short and essentially build up to the end. The key annoyance I had was the long gaps between missions appearing which meant I was stuck doing side missions for the shelter for around an hour waiting for the final mission to open up.

Overall:

An excellent game for building atmosphere and naturally built tension. However, the story elements were the weakest part of the game. The core zombie sandbox with shelter mechanics were clearly the focus of the development team, but it really would have benefited from a better story or conflict between different survivor groups.