State of Decay is an open world zombie action game that plays a bit like Grand Theft Auto. The unfortunate thing is that it plays like older GTA so the controls can be a bit wonky at times, and the game is not without its bugs, but nothing that really breaks the game.
The game starts off with you and your buddy being attacked by zombies. After finishing them off, you are tasked with heading to the first "safe house", which amounts to a camping ranger station that has a handful of people in it. Without ruining the beginning of the game for you lets just say that you join up with a group and start doing some missions.
The mission structure is a bit odd at first. With no real introduction you kind of stumble on to the fact that this game is REALLY open world. You have a journal full of things that you can go do and its pretty much up to you to decide when to do them. After a little bit some of the people that are around the safehouse will start recommending things to do and the map will display some objectives for you.
One of the early missions is to go to a cellphone tower and climb to the top. Once there you enter a viewpoint mode where you can freely look around and discover the world around you. This lends itself to the viewpoints in Assassin's Creed except you don't just hit the button when you get up there, you actually have to look around at question marks keeping the sight on them for a short time until the information about that specific area is revealed. This seems like it might be boring but it is actually a good change of pace from the journey to the tower in the first place.
There are a variety of different missions to do as well. There are always supplies needed, so you can just head house to house and search them for goods (food, medicine, wood, fuel, etc). This is done by walking up to a flashing item (refrigerator, chest of drawers, briefcase, etc) and holding down the Y button until the meter fills up. The meter fills pretty slowly so you must be patient. You can speed up the search by holding the LB button, but this will make noise and alert nearby zombies.
Other missions having you clearing out infested houses which appear red and bloodstained on your map. There are usually quite a few zombies in these houses along with some special zombies like screamers, swat zombies, armored zombies, etc. There are many other types of missions, but those are for you to find out, and many have to do with the story.
Another neat aspect of this game is that it is imperative to be quiet. This is very much a game of patience. The more noise you make, the more trouble can come your way. Sneaking around on foot is preferred to driving around in vehicles because it makes more noise to drive. The driving is also pretty sub par, but there are nice aspects like being able to open the door to bash a zombie while cruising down the street.
When you see zombies in this game, you will learn to become worried very quickly. Often times they come out of nowhere and it is almost impossible to have an encounter with one zombie without others nearby noticing. One or 2 zombies isn't enough to have you on edge, but 3 or more (and there are roaming hordes of them) will have you panicking real quick.
By themselves each zombie is fairly easy to kill, but in a pack they can kill you with haste. This is not like Dead Rising where you can just march into a thousand zombies and just start wreaking havoc. You will learn to run away, and better yet, to sneak.
While sneaking if you walk into a bush you become hidden. This is useful when trying to sneak up on a zombie for a brutal stealth kill, or when you are waiting for a horde to saunter by.
This brings us to the combat. The hand to hand combat responds the way you imagine it would, and is actually implemented pretty well. It feels visceral and raw and the way the characters move makes you really feel that every fight is a fight for your life. The game does a very good job of making you feel desperate at all times.
There are plenty of guns as well, but the gunplay is a little off, there is no auto aim like in the GTA games, and there is no aim assist at all (that I've seen yet, but we'll see), making for some frustrating times. You can level up each character's gun skill, but I haven't done that enough to see what the benefits are.
State of Decay has a full day/night cycle, and believe me, the first time it gets dark you feel like you don't want to leave the safehouse. Sneaking around seems a bit easier at night, but the trade off is that sometimes you can't see a zombie until its right up on you. You have access to a flashlight, but I find that it can tend to be a beacon of death, so I only use it when indoors when there are no zombies around.
The "home base" or safehouse is a customizable area in which your survivors live. There are multiple safehouses in the game, but your crew must move out of one if it wants to use another one. Outposts are another cool feature. While not a decked out as the safehouse, you can resupply and hide out in an outpost. You can have up to 4 outposts at a time. To touch on the customization for the safehouse (also note that outposts cannot be upgraded), once you have enough resources you can build extra sleeping rooms, workshops, medical tents, and other valuable areas that can give you certain perks. For instance, if you have enough beds for all your survivors, you will all have more stamina (which is used for sprinting, attacking, climbing, etc).
At the safehouse you will get to know your fellow survivors. Once you become friends with a survivor, you may play as them whenever you want to (provided they aren't already on an NPC mission). All the survivors have different personalities, different strengths and weaknesses, and different perks (good with guns, athletic, etc). The game doesn't seem to have a strength of making you care about your survivors, but maybe that will develop more (I'm only a few hours into the game).
When a survivor dies, that is it for them. They are gone forever and will not come back. This adds to the tension whenever you are out and about, especially so when you are quite far from the safehouse.
There is a currency system in place, but it isn't money, it is called "influence". In order to get access to a bigger share of the resources such as weapons, medicine, ammo, and other things, you must increase your influence by going on runs to acquire things like weapons, medicine, and various other resources. Think of it as "the more you contribute, the more you can use".
This game is single player only, which is a shame because this would have made for one hell of a great co op game. This game BEGS to be played with your friends. The NPCs do a decent job of helping you on runs and stuff, but man it would be awesome to have some buddies watching your back. Undead Labs really missed the mark by not including a co op feature, but don't let that keep you from getting the game.
The sound is pretty fitting and some of the music is actually really good. The visuals aren't bad but I have seen better. There are a few bugs here and there though. I encountered a bug when I ran into some army guys giving civilians a hard time. They had the 2 civilians on their knees and they happened to be floating in the air above the heads of the army guys. Outside of the occasionally wonky camera (going from indoors to outdoors and vice versa), and the sub par driving controls, this game is really great. I have to give it an 8/10 because it is just so damned well thought out.
The game is available on XBOX LIVE Marketplace for 1600 points ($20). I think this is great because they really could have slapped this in a box and charged $60 for it.
Let us know what you think of State of Decay in the comments section below and stay tuned to Big Ups Gaming for more review like this one. Thanks for reading! (LOL ALL YOUR REVIEW ARE BELONG TO US!!!!1!)
