State of Decay was released in 2013 and developed by Undead Labs.
First off, this is the my perfect kind of zombie guy. Tough, scavenging, building up your safe zone, cars, melee, guns and other friendly survivors. It's missing some stuff sure, but it's the perfect start.
There's a story, it's quite short and nothing amazing, but it's appreciated. You return home to Trumbull, along with your friend. You quickly find out the world is changing as there's a zombie apocalypse afoot. They soon make friends with other survivors and make their new home at a populated church. They meet a bunch of different groups of survivors, all with different goals. You and your new found friends plan to escape the town, which is the main objective.
This game has perma-death, meaning if you die, you're dead. You can play as all different characters, or you can stick to one if you can survive long enough. There's plenty of different characters to play as, you'll meet plenty along your way, and you can even recruit many back to your home base. You can build up your home base, build medical bays, sleeping quarters, watchtowers and more. Each character can build up their stats like stamina, shooting, wits for looting and plenty more.
There's lots to explore, the map is really big, way bigger than you'd think. There's loads of houses and shops for you to loot items, you'll find the right supplies in the right places, bullets in gun stores, medical supplies at the vets. You can travel around the huge map with a mass amount of different vehicles. You can loot rucksacks of supplies which will cost more stamina while sprinting, but you can rack 'em up in the boot of your vehicle. You have to hold the button to loot which is a slower process, but can be sped up holding down another button, at the risk of making more noise and alerting zombies.
Stamina and health are two of your biggest worries, especially in a game where there's perma-death. You can find plenty of health supplies and snacks to restore stamina, you want to always have them in your limited inventory. There's all kinds of melee weapons and types, heavy, blunt, edged. There's a huge arsenal of guns and types of ammo. You can even create silencers and other weapon mods, as well as health supplies if you have a medical bay and munitions shop at your home base. You can even relocate your home base to many different locations, and bring along all your recruited survivors.
Hordes will roam the streets and will come charging at you once you're spotted. A great way of destroying hordes quickly, is to open your car door as you drive past them and smash through them. Ploughing through zombies with your car is a quick way to destroy the vehicle. Zombies will jump on your vehicle and rip your door off if you don't dispatch them. Infestations will often occupy a deserted home, forcing you to clear them out if you want to loot it. There are different zombies types called freaks, swat zombies are armoured up and won't die by guns, ferals are tough and quick, they can tear you apart easily if you're unprepared. Bloaters cause a gas-like explosion and will take your stamina and health down if caught. Screamers will do just that and alert all nearby zombies and juggernauts and tall fat zombies, very difficult to kill and can kill you all too quickly.
As well as the main story, there's plenty of missions types, side missions, freak up, help nearby survivors, ally missions, recruitment, help out injured or lost allies, there's plenty to do. Problem is most of it is just repetitive and you'll get bored quick. Although the voice acting is really good, most characters are voiced by the same person and have the exact same voice. It's even worse when .you're doing the repetitive missions, you'll be quoting the game as you play. I tend to have stuck with a small group of characters and just switched between the group and learnt they're names and built up their skills, rather than play as every character and risk losing survivors who were low levelled.
There's survey areas that allow you to climb up a tall building and scout the land for vehicle's, hordes and possible loot areas. Your weapons can break over time, but you're able to get them repaired at base. You can store all items you've found at base, in return you'll be awarded influence which is sort of currency. You can spend influence to build up your home base and even use it to recruit a survivor to help you complete tasks. You can set up outposts at cleared buildings that help take care of hordes, execute zombies that are knocked down, and use your radio tower to find survivors and supplies. You can also send out runners to pick up supplies you had no room to carry yourself.
There's plenty of flaws, but so many more good things. It can get repetitive if you do anything but the story. It can get boring doing the same thing, especially when the characters sound and say the same things. Zombies would get stuck underground and was a huge pain if you were in a situation where you had to kill every zombie. The biggest issue for me was the lack of coop. This would've been a huge plus, it definitely would've made the repetitive missions more capable.
It's a great game, like I said it's my kinda zombie game. Fix a few issues like less repetitive missions, more voice actors, stronger graphics and coop, you're onto a winner. State of Decay 2 is coming very soon and they've done just that, it's coop! I'm very excited as this could be a stellar game, I'll find out soon.
8.1/10
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