State of Decay

State of Decay starts you off like most zombie games, dead smack in the middle of things. You begin as a survivor named Marcus and are quickly introduced to a world ravaged by the undead, and to other characters, the nature of banding together, and the work of survival. Honestly, the amount you’re introduced to at once can be overwhelming, I sure was. You learn fast that fighting zombies isn’t necessarily your best option: they may be slow and a single bite won’t turn you, but getting battered running around the map can have deathly consequences.

In the first twenty minutes you collect a small band, reach a church, and are immediately shoved out the door to find medicine and supplies. In essence you’re forced to learn the complicated balance of necessity. Home bases have only so much room for beds, workbenches and gardens, and you need a steady stash of supplies and food to keep the base running, or, as I said, deathly consequences. Characters are guaranteed survival only until they’ve served their plot purpose; after that comes the inescapable prospect of permadeath. If you don’t take care of them, they die, I’ve had to come back to base and give a mercy shot or two to those grown too ill to mend. Survivors tire and weaken, so even a favourite can’t be used as often as you’d like before you’re forced to rotate to someone healthier.

One of the most impressive factors is the sense of humanity in each character. People may have skills to pay the bills, but it’s their personalities you also have to watch: fights, disagreements and breakdowns erupt, forcing you to come back and manage morale. Let it fall too low or neglect your group and people start striking out on their own or, in desperate cases, committing suicide. Gaining numbers is usually your best option, but it’s a trial too, more survivors means more mouths to feed and more beds needed, so relocating your base somewhere more hospitable is often wise, if not easy. You’ll rummage house to house staying as quiet as possible, because balancing stealth and action is key when sound matters: busting a locked door, breaking a window, shooting or fighting can draw a horde, or worse, and yes, there is much worse than a horde.

You can swing weapons, jump fences and run for your life, but the harder you work the faster your stamina drains, and zombies that were slow run just as fast as you the moment they spot you. A big backpack grants carrying capacity but makes you heavier and hungrier for stamina. This constant tension between fight, flight and necessity makes even trivial, tedious acts like scavenging heart-pounding. It all comes down to your survivors and the bonds you build, gather supplies, keep things fortified, strengthen those relationships, or it’s downhill from there. The game ties all these systems together under the constant looming threat of death and delivers one of the most collective, terrifying and interactive open worlds to date.

It isn’t flawless. At a glance the game isn’t exactly pretty, and while the controls are easy to grasp, the combat is clunky and poorly formed. The menu and journal screens are cluttered and confusing, often more than the game itself requires. The voice acting isn’t half bad and there’s an impressive amount of dialogue, though the radio chatter repeating the same line about shooting ponies gets irritating (it’s not as bad as it sounds). Worse, you’re never told that supplies brought home for reputation may be lost forever, or that prolonged absence, literally not playing, drains morale, burns supplies and, before a recent patch, drove some survivors to suicide. There’s little guidance to keep everything in check; realistic for an apocalypse, perhaps, but frustratingly overwhelming. The game also misleads you into thinking you’ll have an AI companion, you start as a party of two but end up almost always alone, and for a game built so heavily on relationships and group-building, it’s strange there’s no co-op or online play. Undead Labs has an MMO on the horizon, so for now this feels like their awkward transitional period.

Even so, State of Decay is a terrifyingly bleak survival adventure. If zombie survival were a job, this is a damn good simulation. It stands alongside DayZ, Dead Island and Dead Rising without being a carbon copy of any of them, and despite the flaws it was a fun, tense, exciting experience. I’m definitely excited to see what Undead Labs does next.