![]() And, from then on, she became an integral part of my character rotation. My heroine had no reason to help Lily, but I did it-and nearly died-and finally, this girl who had felt like a collection of statistics began to feel like she belonged in the group. But, when I played her on a sprint (once again literal, as I'd accidentally run into another horde) focused just on acquiring food and construction materials from nearby buildings in Marshall, our resident "voice on the radio"-the lupus-infected Lily-called me and asked if I'd pick up a keepsake from her deceased father. One of my procedurally generated heroines joined the group and didn't want to get to know or talk to anyone beyond Marcus, who had rescued her from a horde when she'd gone out on one of her first supply runs. Eventually, however, the core gameplay loop starts to feel monotonous and tired, which sets in the second your shelters begin to develop any sense of consistent security and prosperity. You may come to rely heavily on the first two characters you find in State of Decay-the tough but lovable Marcus and the guarded but bad-ass Maya-but it's the procedurally generated characters and their interactions with the established voices in your group that craft many of the game's most interesting stories and help to provide a distinct sense of personality to each playthrough. Sit still-I'm not done with this haircut yet! Whether it's the cramped confines of the Spencer's Mill church, where the game proper begins, or one of the more spacious shelters that you can find throughout State of Decay's massive world, you use these survivors to explore towns and the wilderness to look for supplies-food, bullets, guns, medicine, construction materials-to ensure the survival of your home as well as to complete the missions that rocket State of Decay toward its (literal) explosive end. Though the initial hours of the game may give the impression that State of Decay is a punishing and clunky exploration-focused action-adventure game as you complete the scripted prologue and the early (but still heavily scripted) hours of more freeform play, its primary focus is on building and maintaining your community of survivors.īeyond a handful of plot-mandated characters-who can all meet permanent death if you fall to one of the game's many ways to die-you collect a procedurally generated group of survivors that you both control directly and observe as they integrate into their new home. State of Decay feels like a collection of other games' remnants in part because its various systems are separate and distinct entities that often fail to complement each other in meaningful ways. You gather resources, explore, and fight (but mostly avoid) the undead as you look to stay alive. Set in an unspecified portion of the United States, State of Decay tasks you with ensuring the survival of an ever-growing (or shrinking, depending on your competency of play) community after a zombie apocalypse consumes the world. State of Decay: Year-One Survival Edition collects the base State of Decay game from 2013 as well as its two major add-ons (the infinite sandbox Breakdown and the story-driven Lifeline), and updates it for the Xbox One and PC (for those who didn't already own the game for the latter). Intelligent play is not nearly as interesting as life on the edge of total annihilation. But for each moment of spontaneous, unscripted story wonder that State of Decay generates, it is also one glitch, bug, or broken feature away from drawing you completely out of its experience. State of Decay wants to be many games-chief among them the first video game to properly capture the community survival elements of a Dawn of the Dead film in mechanical terms (as opposed to the narrative terms of Telltale's The Walking Dead)-and, at its best moments, it creates a sense of community, tension, and character agency matched by few of its peers. ![]() Whenever I attempt to describe State of Decay to people who have never played the game, I find myself describing the game I want State of Decay to be-and the game that Undead Labs attempted to craft-more than the game that State of Decay actually is. I chased him in his aimless sprint across the decaying but once vibrant Trumbull Valley-killing hordes of zombies to protect him-until, twenty minutes later, I realized that I'd encountered another of State of Decay's game-breaking bugs, and I had to reload my save and start anew. But when we arrived at the home, he fled. How many suburban daydreams had died since the outbreak? He could die with dignity here. ![]() We drove to a home in what had been the pristine town of Marshall. We couldn't risk it we'd sacrificed so much to get there. He was sick, and he was going to die, but he couldn't do it at our new home. We all had that-we knew that we were ticking zombie time bombs.
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