Broken Controllers: State of Decay

    What would you do if you returned from a fishing trip in the back end of nowhere to find that the nearby town had been infested with the undead and cut off from the rest of the world? Well the answer to this critical question is often answered with a chattering assault rifle and badass one-liners. Not the case in State of Decay.

    State of Decay takes place in the remnants of a small town where a small number of survivors are trying to keep themselves alive in a zombified world. The game is functionally different from numerous its companions in the genre by giving you control over all the survivors; once you have enough trust with them.

    So to start with the game is third person with both close combat and gun combat. Both work exceedingly well with guns not being superpowered or so pathetic that their limited and hard to find ammo isn't worth the space in your bag. Even with both options available the main way the player is going to take on the undead is with the variety of close combat weapons you come across in the world. These weapons also degrade with use so while you might pick a favorite weapon it will break and finding an exact replacement will be hard to come across. They divided them into three types Bludgeoning; which is a good balance between attack speed and damage, Edged which is fast but doesn't hit as hard so while you are hacking limbs off zombies you aren't knocking them down as much as with others, Finally there are Heavy weapons; these weapons hit with the most force and nearly knock a zombie down with every swing but are really slow. The firearms follow a similar approach but in a very specific fashion that doesn't have as much direct effect coming in variety's of pistol, shotgun, rifle, and submachine gun. Near the end of the game I found a grenade launcher but had no ammo for it and never got a chance to test it out. Guns are limited by their ammo as I stated above, the game doesn't have a generic ammo and each gun needs a certain kind of ammo like 9mm or 7.62.

    Playing the game each character has their vitality and their stamina. Vitality is how much health you have and Stamina is how far you can sprint and swinging melee weapons. Running out in a clustered melee with two or three zombies is highly likely which makes each swing count. Single Zombies are not a threat to the player, the exception to that are the special zombies which I blame Left 4 Dead for introducing.

    All that said that stuff is all fairly standard in zombie games now, what makes State of Decay so interesting and fun is the way it is presented. You have a home base filled with the survivors you have picked up and one of your main tasks is to gather resources in order to build things like an infirmary or workshop or to just keep everyone alive. In fact as you are wandering around you will come across materials and you can do one of three things. Break it down to use for yourself, put it in a rucksack and carry it around or call your home base and they'll send a runner out to gather it up. With the third option every now and then you'll be alerted that your runner is in trouble and needs help. You can always ignore these calls but it may result in your person dying. The other feature that I loved was the open world aspect despite it being the cause of a few of the issues. The game also has a few skills that increase based on use, so the more times you shoot zombies the more your shooting skill goes up. This grants certain bonuses like quicker reloads. The key to all these skills though and it encourages using a few core characters is that each one has a set of background, let's call them feats, that do certain things and bestow certain benefits. Like a character might have the feat that grants the Powerhouse skill or have one that makes it quicker to upgrade the fighting skill.

    While exploring they did a very good job of reinforcing the old Zombie genre adage of staying quiet is staying alive. While all my characters carried firearms I always thought hard about firing them because they would inevitably draw more zombies. Driving does this as well so while you get where you are going faster if it is in the same town as you started you may end up with twenty zombies chasing you when you get out. Of course cars make great tools for killing off Zombie hordes as you can simply drive over them all. Health recovery is done through painkillers found in the world and you can recover stamina by snacking.

    Well we all knew we would get to the bad eventually. While the game does look like a full release title and the world is big. I actually give it points for having no fast travel even cross map. The issue is that it occasionally has item pop in. This is worse near the city portion of the map. I'm glad cars don't have realistic damages or else I'd have been walking for a long time during this game with all the walls and items popping in in front of my bumper. The other thing that I wanted was the ability to take additional survivors out with you on your scavenging runs. As it stands you are alone for most of the game while actually exploring. Honestly though I think those are small problems especially with an arcade title that only costs twenty bucks.

    I don't feel that I am doing this game justice as I talk about it but I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in playing a zombie game that isn't all about the action. Picking places to set up your outposts and getting back to base while badly wounded is a great feeling. Well worth the twenty bucks and more.

    Zach Out.