State of Decay Reviews

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Written by WorstUsernameEver on July 12th, 2013

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State of Decay is a scrappy, somewhat coarse game on its surface level. Its systems are poorly explained, its textures lacking in detail, its gunplay entirely functional. But its systems have a clockwork-like beauty, interlocking with rare grace to create a vivid, meaningful world in which player-driven stories arise with delightful frequency. Its dialogue is passable, its pre-scripted missions workmanlike and its interface fussy. But look past the ragged façade and you'll discover one of the finest open world games yet made, an experience that trades cinematic sheen for a different sort of impact, one that leaves you grieving over unscripted deaths and celebrating the little victories. State of Decay is unrefined but never anything less than interesting. And in video games, interesting has never been at such a premium.

State of Decay serves up a near constant barrage of suspense and immersion that leaves even the briefest jaunts away from your home base tinged with the threat of death. Fair warning: it ends too abruptly with an all-too-obvious nod toward downloadable content or a sequel (perhaps, rumors say, in massively multiplayer online role-playing game form), but an option to return to your latest save file ensures that you can continue foraging for as long as you like. And you should. Its flaws are numerous and impossible to ignore, but in spite of them, State of Decay is a captivating survival adventure set in a bleak and harrowing world.

State Of Decay is an amazing videogame, albeit one hiding beneath one of the ugliest, creakiest engines we've seen in some time. It's a complex, inaccessible beast, but one of the most rewarding and compelling open-world games in years. This is The Walking Dead: The Simulator. And it's every bit as good as that sounds.

State Of Decay works because it takes the clichés of zombie fiction clashing survivor personalities, scavenging for supplies, roaming hordes, infested houses, amateurishly fortified safehouses and successfully translates them into a set of intersecting systems and rules. Sometimes these rules seem arbitrary. Scavenge too quickly through houses for supplies, for example, and you might, somehow, make such a racket while rifling through a backpack that a crowd of nearby undead draws near. At other points, they integrate beautifully, such as when your attempt to clear out an infestation that's affecting the morale of your safehouse alerts a nearby horde. The game never judges you, offering no morality system despite the frequent dilemmas and difficult choices its systems organically generate. But it certainly tests you. This is as close as we've come to putting our lazily daydreamed zombie survival plans into effect.

State of Decay is ugly. It looks ugly, and in many ways it plays ugly. However, there's a simple beauty underneath the frightful veneer, one that surrounds a compelling, interesting, complex, and enslaving little game. There is absolutely more to this game than meets the eye, and despite the overwhelming amount of zombie games vying for our attention, this is certainly one I'm glad to see in the world.

Few zombie games, for all their marketing power and visual sheen, can come close to providing what State of Decay does.

But that type of storytelling, in which powerfully relatable characters emote believably before our sympathetic eyes, isn't well suited to videogames. The best type of storytelling in a videogame is the type of storytelling that makes videogames unique: me in a sandbox of possibility, making stories out of my own choices. State of Decay is the open-world action version of Sarah Northway's brilliant Rebuild, with that game's same combination of story beats and sandboxing. It combines the best of scripting and the best of freedom, and along the way it believes first and foremost in gameplay. It knows it's no mere movie. Its priority is on letting decisions happen and allowing consequences to play out. There are very few games that manage this as richly and with as much texture as State of Decay. Never mind the zombies. This is a great game no matter what the niche.

At the end of the day this $20 downloadable game offers more content then many $60 titles available, and that is a great dollar value. It is a bit disappointing though that there is no form of cooperative play to be found here, but one can only hope that in the future this would be an addition. State of Decay is certainly not without its flaws, but if you can see past them you'll find that there is a boatload of entertaining gameplay that awaits you in this unique zombie survival simulator.

It's a game that could have used some more polish. The experience gets clunky at times, the user interface can be needlessly complex, gameplay can be unbalanced and the general visual appearance can be decidedly uglier. But there is more than meets the eye here; State of Decay does offer value for money, in a way that few modern blockbuster-budgeted games can, for a mere third of the price that you'd usually pay in the end.

It's true that the idea of State Of Decay is far more exciting than the business of actually playing it, but its successes are not purely theoretical. Driving around (in a car that handles like something out of Deadly Premonition) and spotting, at random, a family under attack and then deciding whether to risk saving them and thereby adding to your population is an interesting gameplay mechanic and an affecting piece of dynamic storytelling.
When it works it works well, but State Of Decay is far too inconsistent. If you want to experience the day-to-day realities of living in a zombie-filled world though this certainly beats a trip down to the local shopping centre.

State of Decay is, at it's core, a mixed bag that will not be for everyone. Those who will enjoy the zombie hunting and killing, may not like the long fetch quests and team building. Others may be turned off by the ho-hum voice acting and strange visual issues. This one is difficult to recommend as a must buy, but it's something you may want to look into with a quick go on the demo. Once I got into it for a while, I started to enjoy my time. Others may be hard pressed to find something to like. It's no Dead Island, but it's on par with other zombie survival games and can provide you with a nice challenge.

And therein lies the biggest paradox of this living-dead simulation; State of Decay is a game that is, in many ways, both the best and worst zombie game you've ever played. For all of its bugs, blemishes, and festering imperfections, this game realizes an untapped style of survival gameplay that genre nuts should definitely take notice of. It doesn't reach the level of quality some other zombie titles have clambered up to, but for all its awkward shambling and stumbling around, State of Decay avoids much of the stagnation that seems to have settled over both the zombie and survival horror genres as a whole. Looks can be deceiving -- there's more life in this unique Xbox Live Arcade than you might imagine.

State of Decay is one of the weirdest games I have ever had to review. Watching our Fondling video you would begin to believe that I hated it to its very core. Still after resetting and digging into the world, I couldn't stop playing it. Undead Labs has created what I truly wanted out of something like The Walking Dead as a video game, and anyone who is a fan of that type of drama should definitely check it out. Be aware of the technical issues going in though, they will be the one thing that can truly hold this title back.

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