THE DEAD TIMES

RATING:

ZOMBIE RATING:

DESCRIPTION:

State of Decay is an open-world game where you gather resources, fabricate strongholds, rescue survivors, form a survival group for safety in numbers, complete tasks and try to eke out a living in a rural American town during a Zombie apocalypse. Unlike many other Zombie games, combat is not always the best course of action - using firearms against the walking dead usually just attracts more of them due to the loud noise of gunshots and repetitively smashing skulls with melee weapons will, eventually, cause all such weapons to shatter into useless fragments. Also, this world is dynamic - it will change with the ever increasing Zombie threat, varying with the actions you take. Save a civilian and they might join your group, increasing its chances of survival, going on supply runs to gather essentials for the benefit of the entire community. Let that civilian die to hungry jaws and there is one less mouth to feed but that potentially group saving character is gone forever - decisions are key.

MY VERDICT:

This game is truly awesome on paper but, when you actually start playing, it loses much of its charm. For a start, the developers have realised the best bits of the Zombie genre come more from human drama than repetitive undead slaying - definitely a plus point. However, the problem is that all characters in this game are extremely hollow with hardly any personality and only minimal dialogue. Each survivor you meet is basically a copy of the last with a new appearance and some different (but largely irrelevant) skills. You simply will not care when they die as you are bound to come across someone almost identical later on - ruining a major aspect of the game. Other problems include; resources being plentiful, shoddy 'just hammer the attack button' combat, fairly boring missions, no real immersion as you can freely switch control to any member of your group meaning you never really feel like an individual struggling to survive, and a complete lack of challenge - dying is actually an in-game achievement, one that I had to "work" to obtain.