The Titanic, the Hindenburg, Obamacare. That feeling when you see a really good idea turned into an absolute disaster, it’s one of dismay, disappointment, of “everything was going well until we hit that iceberg.” This is the best way I can sum up State of Decay, and while actual lives aren’t at stake (as far as we know), the overall experience is a stream of good ideas that fall flat due to overall ineffective execution and at times, flat ineptitude.
State of Decay fancies itself as an open world zombie survival game, the story starts you off the same way you may make small talk with a buddy: “You’re trapped in the zombie apocalypse. Go!” Seeing as how zombies have a well established narrative shorthand in our culture this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it’s not like the story has to out-do Dead Island’s opening of stumbling around drunk to the lyrics of “Who Do You Voodoo Bitch” or Resident Evil’s expert storytelling which informed you Jill was the master of unlocking, no, my problem is with the fact the sloppy shorthand is a painful sign of things to come, for lack of a better word the game is infected with instances where just a bit more polish and thoughtfulness could have gone miles in improving the experience.
Sometimes you go on vacation, come back, and everyone’s dead. As is life.
The first thing that pulled my attention were the graphics, and I don’t mean mind blowing vistas or excellently put together character models, I mean quite simply how rough everything looked, with nonexistent textures, hard edges and lousy shading. Trying to tweak the graphics did very little in terms of improving the look. So I figure, it’s a bit of an ugly duckling, I can roll with that. I headed up to the ranger station, where I was told to ‘look for survivors on the campground” when the objective was really “search for supplies in a really tight circle around the building”, I ended up fumbling around a bit not because I was unclear, but because poor dialogue on their part pointed me in the wrong direction. Eventually I met a woman named Maya, a “strong female character” who in actuality reminded me more of an ornery old man, but that whole tough chick persona was once again… sloppy shorthand. This is all made worse by the realization that the campground is a false start, the entire area was meant to be a tutorial. A tutorial that was boring, gave you a poor introduction to the world, and didn’t properly explain its core gameplay model, in short; a waste of time.
That’s…. Yeah that’s not a thing that happens.
This is all without talking about the game’s largest fault, the camera. While not every camera I’ve had to work with in a video game was “agreeable” they’ve at least more or less gotten the job done in the sense it showed me my character and gives me a rough idea of how I’m meant to navigate the world. Not so in State of Decay, while I can’t properly comment on how the camera functioned in the XBLA version, on the PC it was a bit of a nightmare. Since it’s a horror game you’re going to want to use the camera to keep an eye on your surroundings and any action going on behind you, the camera however takes forever to properly orient itself behind your character and vehicle, so your often left trying to control it manually. The camera sensitivity however is so off that you’re only going to get two types of motion out of it, “slow and jittery” or “wild swing around the room”, the camera is basically detrimental to the gameplay experience.
If nothing else environments were at least believable, I feel like I passed this pastiche diner on my way upstate before.
The problems go on, the game is poorly optimized (tested on two different machines) with slowdown in nonsensical places, character models are poorly animated, there’s no end to the visual glitches, enemy spawns are random and constant, combat is uninteresting, driving is worse, the list continues. Missions aren’t exactly the most exciting thing overall, a theme sandbox games seem to like to stick to, and what story there is happens to be irksome since the game favors morals and first world problems over pragmatism (you shouldn’t have stolen that walkie talkie off that corpse, because stealing is wrong! I can’t search for supplies with you because you’re unpopular! I’m more worried what my sibling will think of my lover than I am getting my ass out of this zombie infested barn!) Despite all this there are, shockingly, a few diamonds to be found in this rough.
While I don’t mind your lifestyle I do kind of mind we’re all about to be eaten.
By this point in my review it sounds like I loathed every minute… Well, not exactly. As I said at the start, it fancies itself as a zombie survival open world game, and once you get past the miserable tutorial and into the actual open world the game picks up a little. For one, supplies mean something, you initially hole up in a church with several other survivors and day by day your food and medicine supplies will dwindle, weapons and vehicles also have a stamina rate and if they take too much damage they’ll be rendered unusable. You can find new supplies, weapons and vehicles by raiding different areas in the surrounding town, maybe a diner will have some badly needed leftovers, or you can check that veterinary clinic for painkillers and antibiotics, there are a few catches though. For one you can only carry so much back with you to the safehouse, some days you may need to go out on a medicine run, other days you may want to dedicate solely to gathering ammo. The other catch? The places you raid never replenish their supplies, the more places you raid the harder it is going to be to survive in the long run. You can build additions to your safehouse, bunks, gardens, all for the sake of making a more survivable environment.
Death is pretty permanent, careful out there kids!
This makes the survival model fairly interesting and adds a level of strategy you wouldn’t take away from the game with its opening pitch. However there’s an extra element here that makes it even more interesting, You, the player will likely be taking on the role of several survivors as you go through the game, which is important because characters you’re in control of can die, and when they do there’s no game over, and there’s no going back since death ensures an auto-save, the game keeps going only with one less character on your roster. You’re likely not going to feel any emotional attachment to the character as they come in flavors that range from “Angry Woman” to “Angry Man” to “Other Angry Woman” or if they really want to throw you for a loop “Not So Angry Man”, but it does add another dimension to the strategy required in playing the game, you’ll debate whether it’s worth dragging another survivor along with you in a supply run, or whose stats will be best geared towards clearing a zombie infested house.
Fall harvest is coming in nicely.
That being said, losing your final survivor just spawns you a random, new survivor, often a palette swap of another character with randomized traits. While it’s certainly a strategy, accommodating playstyles from conservative to reckless, it does deflate that innate tension knowing survivors are a revolving door, lemmings instead of “last man or woman on Earth.” The only major penalty for death, outside of maybe losing a character with leveled stats, is the loss of morale and “Influence”, the game’s currency used for building, recruiting survivors in your camp and taking items from the lockup. It all feels relatively minor though, as Influence is easy enough to make back and stats increase quickly. It could work but it falls a little flat. All things considered it’s not the game’s largest fault, but it ruins the final illusion of things having real consequence.
Meet Kimberly, number 3 in my revolving door of survivors.
The game could have used some more work. The cut corners, the copy and paste story (An evil U.S. Military? In a zombie narrative? Say it ain’t so!), the obnoxious characters, the game design flaws, the animations, the camera issues, the glitches, the optimization, these are all things that could have easily been addressed with a little tender loving care. Now, to be fair on the part of the developers they have promised they will continue to patch the PC port for weeks to come, and it needs it. I’m also aware State of Decay is meant to be working up towards a grander scheme, a zombie MMO, but these concessions don’t change the fact the product that was shipped out the door doesn’t feel good, it also doesn’t change core design flaws.
There’s a really great idea at the core of this game, it just feels like for whatever reason Undead Labs rushed a rough product out the door. A good idea only gets you so far, good execution is the key to creating a solid winner. Incredibly hardcore fans of the zombie genre may find a thing or two to love about this game, but in this reviewer’s opinion there are far better options out there worth your time and money.
