State of Decay Review (Xbox & PC)

State of Decay doesn’t fill your head with the usual long-winded pre-outbreak clichés to set the tone; it drops you directly into the immediate aftermath of a global pandemic, and then simply tells you to survive. It doesn’t beat around the bush with its setup; in fact, it openly tells you that, if you so much as take a bullet to the knee (or a bite to the neck), then your character is as good as dead and buried. It doesn’t give you a chance to rewrite your tale; it simply unveils a eulogy, and it gives you the opportunity to fill the boots of another survivor—a character who, rather annoyingly, has little to no foraging skills or combat experience whatsoever. And that, really, is how State of Decay pulls you in — with a rather daunting reality check that forces you to critique every detail , every foraging expedition, and every survivor who you bring back to your homestead.

State of Decay does something a little different with the undead formula: it removes the checkpoints and auto-save system from the pot, and it tasks you with molding a survivor from a pittance, and learning how to keep them alive when all odds are stacked against them. Imagine that, and then picture my disbelief as that same souped-up hero wound up meeting a fate worse than death, with as little as a short eulogy to comfort me merely forty seconds after their demise. From those ashes, I began to hate State of Decay. But then, after a ping on the radio and a desperate cry from a community that lacked the resources to make it through another evening, I found a new lease on life—a reason to fill the shoes of a stranger. I wanted to start again, and I wanted to take control of the reins in the wake of a horrific loss. One survivor passed away, yet there was no time to mourn. I had a job to do.

It isn’t all that often that you grow attached to your heroes. Yet, in State of Decay, the game makes it so that you almost feel the weight of the world on your shoulders. Sadly, it doesn’t hold your hand as you watch your loved one lose their final fragments of life; it simply cuts out to a ten-second funeral and ushers you forward. Your stats that you spent hours building from the ground up? Gone. Those building materials and medical supplies that you traveled hours to find? Merely a speck of dirt among hordes. Oh, State of Decay gives you a lesson, alright: reckless attitude is an advocate for an avoidable grave. It’s just a shame that it took me a handful of hours to figure that out. Woe is me, I guess.

Against the Storm

At its core, State of Decay is an open-world survival game in which your sole purpose, other than to keep your heart within your chest, is to establish a base and ultimately expand across vast wooded regions. Within the framework of a relatively textbook foraging sim, you essentially have a survival-driven ecosystem where every material has the potential to be used for upgrading your camp, whether it’s a medical station, a watch tower, or sleeping quarters for your survivors.

A non-linear RPG at best, the game invites you to take the weight of the world into your own hands. As a lone wolf among sheep, you have the power to make crucial decisions that alter your own community. Embedded within all of these minor choices idles a surprisingly in-depth management system that keeps you high on your toes and forever second guessing your moral compass. For example, you might find yourself with a campsite that’s teetering on the brink of moral decay. Do you send out a wounded survivor to forage for supplies? Do you tighten the bond with a neighboring community to poach their resources? The decisions are yours to make, but the outcomes, scarily, are yours to take to the grave.

State of Decay is very much a game that can go one of several ways. Although the opening chapters invite you to embark on a somewhat linear journey, if only to find your bearings and get a feel for the mechanics, what follows suit is entirely in your hands. Will you branch out and hole up in your own house, or will you form a community? Will you be the saving grace for those in dire need of aid, or will you send your grunts out to do the dirt work whilst you reap the benefits? Frankly, there’s a lot for you to ponder here, and not to mention a lot of open-ended avenues to explore alongside a series of quests and foraging missions.

There is one other thing that plays a huge part in the game, and that’s influence. See, unlike most survival games where you can acquire access to items, tools, and weapons without having to worry about kickback, State of Decay makes it so that each character has to earn their share. For instance, if you don’t forage for items or assist with side missions, then you won’t have the influence needed to take advantage of the items that you stockpile. In other words, if you drag your feet, then you won’t be given the opportunities to expand. And that goes for most of the things in the game, too, with base-building, backup requests, and scavenging support all playing into your influence and your overall respect. It’s a neat feature, and honestly, one of those little details that you can’t help but love.

Enjoy the Little Things

While you could argue that State of Decay is a little dated, and that it fails to deliver an authentic combat-driven experience, it does manage to perfect a lot of crucial aspects of its genre. For example, surviving isn’t a picnic that you can simply breeze through and still come out from; it’s a ruthless endeavor that often requires careful preparation and tactical maneuvers. In an attempt to reflect a real-life outbreak, it forces you to think ahead and calculate your risks. Case in point, you may ask yourself, is it worth going by foot to save fuel? Will a gunshot alarm the nearby horde? Could I clear just one more spot on the map before heading back to camp? The questions are there, but the consequences of your actions are a lot heavier than in most survival-crafting games. A blessing, or a curse? A bit of both, I suppose.

Granted, the voiceover work isn’t great here, and each character that you play does read from the same script, meaning, you can’t miss out on any special dialogue or character-locked moments. The driving, too, is a little temperamental, which can also lead to a lot of beaten vessels and a fair amount of legwork. It isn’t all doom and gloom, but to say that State of Decay is a flawless experience just wouldn’t be true. Truth be told, it does fall short in a ton of areas. Yet, for where it falls short of fluid controls, it makes up for with a lofty base-building and morale management system. That aspect of the game, really, is second to none. Well, for its time, anyway. Lest we forget that we’re talking about a double ex-gen title here.

Verdict

State of Decay finds ground between an engrossing base-building RPG and an in-depth survival-crafting zombie game that bends to your every decision, with its technical challenges and rigorous perma-death system reflecting an authentic outbreak simulator that feels both gripping and satisfying. Sure, it’s a little dated, and its combat-driving mechanics aren’t quite up to scratch. But, these are minor setbacks for what is, in all honesty, one of the best zombie-centric RPGs of all time.