State of Decay was the first game with which I ever used a game capture device to record myself playing. The end result was certainly nothing special, and I don’t know if the videos even exist anymore, as it was little more than a test of the technology. For that reason, however, State of Decay stays in my mind as one of the few zombie games I’ve purchased, played, and, to a certain degree, enjoyed. At the time of its release, the survival genre was just starting to take off, so there wasn’t a ton of competition for a game like it. Since then, there have been countless other additions to the survival genre of the undead variety. Recently, I decided to finally try out the second game to see what had been done to stay fresh and new in a more competitive market.

The Short of It

What I’ve Played

Juggernaut Edition
16 hours on default difficulty settings
Questline incomplete for first community on single-player
Prior to the 'Plague Territory’ patch

Pros

Similar to the first game, it controls pretty well and is satisfying to play for a time
Fits a good ‘mindless’ game to play when you don’t want to focus too hard on anything
Lots of tools, gear, upgrades, and skills to characters to make your group of survivors unique and specialized
Base management system is a little more in-depth with the upgrades and facilities you can use
Has the exploitable nature of an open-world game

Cons

Not a big improvement over the previous game; no substantial new mechanics to really shake things up
Needs more real quests and storylines for the potential characters
Once you are established, there’s not much challenge to the experience on the default difficulty
Gameplay loop gets stale
Buggy open world
Quests are often inconvenient with their destinations
Not meant for a single-player experience

The Rest of It

Story

The world has fallen apart in the wake of an undead outbreak. Unlike how the outbreak had just started at the beginning of the previous game, the plague itself is far more established than before and the survivors seem to know that there’s no real end in sight. It’s not about saving the world. It’s about surviving in the harsh new world that exists.

In the previous State of Decay, the opening scene was always the same. You played as a couple friends who were on a camping trip when they suddenly had to fend off the undead. To add a small layer of complexity to the premise of State of Decay 2, there’s now the option to choose an opening pair of characters. To say that this change provides much depth to the story is giving it too much credit, but I was certainly hopeful for a deeper story under the surface when I first saw the options.

Despite the pairs of characters having their own backstories that differ from one another, the starting tutorial section is always the same. During the tutorial and well after leaving it, most of the dialogue exchanged between characters is somewhat stock and lacks much unique quality to make it anything more than relatively pointless. The dialogue spoken by characters is mostly just placeholder text, clearly meant to be something that could be said by someone else in a different scenario.

The gameplay loop of State of Decay 2 ensures that characters are far more interchangeable and disposable than a game where the world is not procedurally populated with NPCs and enemies. Regardless of whatever the ‘past’ of a character is, it’s something that can be recycled over and over again by any other character with a different face. I don’t know if there is an actual end storyline that takes place because I wouldn’t say I got that far. I just know I’d be surprised if there was one because I think the purpose of State of Decay 2 is just to create a sandbox simulation for you to try to see how long you can last.

Gameplay

The core gameplay loop of State of Decay 2 can be described in relatively simple terms. You go out and explore the world looking for resources, killing or avoiding any zombies you find along the way. You return to your home base where you deposit said resources in the base’s storage, make any necessary adjustments to the base’s capabilities while you’re home, then go back out and do it again until your survivor gets fatigued. Then, you bring him or her back to camp and swap them out for one who isn’t tired and continue the gameplay loop. Maybe along the way you’ll come across a quest, or another group of survivors that wants to trade with you, or maybe you’ll find another base that seems better than the one you’re at and you’ll move to it. After moving to a new base and getting all the upgrades however, things don’t really change much.

As you play State of Decay 2, you take control of a single survivor from your group. While controlling a survivor, you can bring them to different locations, i.e. abandoned buildings, and scavenge through the different objects contained within for items and resources. Sometimes, you’ll find things that can immediately assist your survivor, like weapons or medicine, which help perpetuate your exploration of the territory. Other times, you might find something that would benefit the whole community, like crafting materials or resources, like food and fuel.

While you’re scavenging, you always have to exhibit a bit of caution. If you make too much noise, some zombies will come running and try to chew you out for making a racket. If you’re lucky, it’s just the regular ones that are a dime a dozen. If they’re in a group, it can be a problem when you’re by yourself, but they’re far more manageable than the special types. The ones that were present in the previous game are all here: Boomer, Juggernaut, Feral, Bloater, and Screamer. Their names are all descriptive enough that I don’t feel the need to explain them and what they do. However, there is another type that is new to the franchise: Plague zombies.

The plague zombies are a special breed that are somewhat tied to the general safety and progression of the area in which your community resides. They, while mostly as slow and weak as the regular zombies, pose an extra threat. If your survivor gets hit by one of these zombies, they are immediately infected with the blood plague to a certain degree. The more they get hit, the more infected they become. Once infected, that survivor will start to experience viral symptoms and need to be put in the infirmary. If you don’t manage to grab enough of the blood-plague samples to make an antidote in time, you can expect your survivor to get a sudden craving for raw meat. While you can never fully rid the map of these red-eyed threats, you can go around and remove the plague hearts that are scattered throughout the map which represent the overall threat and presence of plague zombies in the area. This is usually a risky mission with lots of rewards. Even on the default difficulty, these were definitely the toughest of things to take down.

After going out on a few expeditions, it doesn’t take long for your survivor to get fatigued, meaning their stamina will be reduced. This prevents you from being able to run as far, or to swing a melee weapon as much, without running out of breath and having to wait for the meter to recharge. Despite State of Decay 2 being relatively easy at a default setting, having low stamina can put you in a very tough spot if surrounded by plague zombies and with no vehicle to get you home quickly. If my survivor was tired, I usually would head back home and switch to someone else with some energy before going back out again. I also often recruited an AI helper at the same time to join me as a pack mule and as a bit of a back-up buddy in case things got sketchy with the undead.

Rinse and repeat the strategy of staying energized between expeditions and it will still take no time at all to create a collection of weapons, drugs, materials, and resources back at your base. The more you have, the more secure your base inevitably ends up becoming, as more survivors will have access to all the goodies you find to help protect themselves. Some resources even allow for your base to upgrade facilities, or even use special features of a facility.

For instance, with fuel, you can power the generator of a base, which will then increase the range of help signals, or the efficiency of another facility in the base. This also often improves the morale of the base. Improved morale makes survivors more cheerful and less likely to have negative interactions with each other, which could lead to conflicts that could ultimately result in the death of a survivor, if you are careless to their needs. The downside to performing these beneficial actions in your base is that it often raises the awareness of nearby zombies and increase the risk of a horde attacking your home. It’s a trade-off, but depending on your difficulty, you’ll likely have enough survivors and resources to fend off the encroaching crowds of undead.

The combat, while relatively simple, is still satisfying in its own right. Survivors can equip a melee weapon and a ranged weapon. Aside from bows or guns with silencers, guns make a lot of noise that can attract unwanted attention. Guns also use up ammunition, which may not be as easy to come by as you’d like in some circumstances. I never ran out of ammo, but there are a variety of guns that use different types of ammo and not all of them are easily collected. So, you have to do a bit of micromanaging with your survivors to see who should carry which weapons. Ammo isn’t the only motivator to do this, though.

Some characters have skills that can be leveled up the more they use certain weapons. For example, a character could have skills that make them more lethal with heavy melee weapons, or long ranged guns, and so on. Some of these skills or traits characters have are improved through facilities in a base as well, making a character who is skilled with medicine almost always a necessity. Meanwhile, there are some characters who just have traits that might as well be jokes for how useless they are. It’s all meant to help you better: manage your survivors’ abilities, choose a base that best suits survivor skills, pair up the right teams of survivors, and prevent the people who have the most volatile personalities from negatively impacting your progress. You could always just ensure the troublesome ones have an unfortunate accident while out exploring, though…

I like the way State of Decay 2 controls. I like the deliberate nature of the character movement and attacks. I like the somewhat finnicky behavior of the cars on the road. I like the gunplay, simple as it is. I like the mechanic of going out into the dangerous world and scavenging for resources to build up a base and do more with the survivors I have. Unfortunately, even with all these things I like about the general gameplay and mechanics of the game, I think the gameplay loop gets real boring if you are playing it by yourself. There just isn’t enough there to keep the loop interesting or engaging. Sure, you might come across a group of survivors who have their own interesting traits and dialogue. You might get a quest to complete from someone you met or someone who contacted you over the radio. However, none of the quests or missions I did were all that interesting.

It was most often just the same old thing over and over of doing fetch quests or clearing hostiles out of buildings. Despite the fact that State of Decay 2 gives you the option of opening up the game with characters who have their own backstory, it actually has less of a sense of progression that would normally motivate me to continue than the first game. State of Decay 2 does have new mechanics, like the plague hearts that you have to go clear out, which can get pretty dicey if you aren’t careful. However, once I cleared them all out of my neighborhood, there wasn’t a whole lot left for me to do that interested me.

I think this game is just not meant to be played alone. It's mindless fun that becomes mindlessly dull if you’re by yourself. Bumping up the difficulty doesn’t really change things for the solo experience, other than simply making it harder. I think that the only way to truly enjoy State of Decay 2 is to have some friends with you on a harder difficulty. You can laugh and be actually concerned about going out to get more supplies that you will desperately need. Without that real-life comradery to add the personal story to the experience, it just a rinse and repeat sort of game.

To give State of Decay 2 credit, I want to briefly mention the difficulty. The default difficulty is pretty easy and bumping things up to a harder level wouldn’t be enough to make the game more interesting in a single-player experience. However, I do appreciate the way the developers designed the difficulty. Games simply don’t do this enough and I wish more did. Most of the time, it’s just a change in the amount of damage dished out by enemies and players. In some games, there’s something different about the types of items, or drop rates, but usually it’s just a change to how many hits you can take before your game ends.

State of Decay 2 breaks up the different factors of the difficulty to give you options on how you want your experience to go. It’s not just a damage buff or debuff. It’s the frequency of encounters with special zombies. It’s how durable your equipment is. It’s how many resources you need to keep your base running. Fully maxed out in each measure, I can only imagine the struggle and how much fun it would be to share that experience with a friend. Alas, I don’t have many who are available who would want to play a zombie survival game.

Presentation

Despite being a game developed for the Xbox One, I can’t say that State of Decay 2 looks all that good. It’s certainly an improvement over the previous entry, but it’s still a bland-looking game. The abandoned towns look fine and the environments themselves can be nice to look at from a distance, but the survivors and zombies all lack much interesting detail. Perhaps the point is to get you to go through the various clothes you find and play dress up to make them stand out more.

The music is mostly atmospheric with the occasional strum of a banjo to make it match the somewhat Appalachian environment. However, I mostly just had my own music playing while in-game once I discovered the characters weren’t saying anything interesting. The sound effects and design are good, though. Listening for the sound of an incoming zombie sounded real nice with my headphones. It was a good way to get immersed for a bit and occasionally get startled, before I lost interest.

The last thing I’ll mention about the presentation is that it’s an open world game, so expect bugs. I don’t really like to give a pass on bugs in games that are developed by big studios with endless budgets, but it is an open-world environment. Some people are willing to accept open-world games as a bottomless pit of bugs. For the most part, I tolerate them where I can. The frequency in which I encountered them in State of Decay 2, however, a game that’s been out for multiple years, was a bit much to ask.

TL;DR (Conclusion)

While I initially had a good time with State of Decay 2, and despite having a moderately fun time with the previous installment, it got stale. As a person who rarely gets the chance to play multiplayer games with friends, it was clear this game wasn’t designed for me. There was still some satisfaction to be found, and maybe if I had just started the game on a harder difficulty, I’d be singing a different tune. However, once I got my base established and everything in place, I ran out of reasons to keep turning the game on. I can only recommend it to die-hard zombie-survival fans, or fans of the first game who have at least one buddy around willing to play along.

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