A 'State of Decay'

I'm not ashamed to admit it I've thought about "the plan" after the moment of infection if the world were to come to an end in a plague of the walking dead. It's not all that complex I decided that I don't really have the street smarts to make it in a world where the deck has been reshuffled so have decided of a mixture of laying and praying and going down swinging. Recently there have been various titles that allow the hardcore zombie hunter to play out their end of days fantasies from Resident Evil to Dead Island but as of yet we've never seen an actual sandbox survival 'em up zombie apocalypse.

Enter State of Decay on the Xbox arcade that delivers just that a huge open world where as a survivor you have to just basically survive: gathering stuff from houses, basing "z's" brains in and negotiating with other groups for resources and assistance. On paper it looks like the closest thing to impending doom that you can get while having the sticks in your hands.

Everything about State of Decay should mean that it's a title that I can't put down but for some reason I feel cheated. It's delivering everything that it promised it would: the gathering, the bashing, the negotiating and the surviving but it just feels like there's something missing amongst the hordes of shuffling dead.

State Of Decay starts off a few weeks after the initial outbreak and joins our heros up out of the way of it all in a campsite in the hills. There's no time for flashy cut scenes or even adequate tutorials as you're thrown head first into the action bashing and collecting from  the off. The combat is a nice mixture between stealthy and hack and slash with players able to chose if they want to go all gun-ho and risk attracting a horde or throw a bunch of fire-crackers and sneak on past. Whereas the collecting, an integral part of the later game in order to help the group survive, at the start is interesting trying to make as little noise as possible while rummaging through sock draws trying to find a semi-automatic machine gun (It's where I keep mine!) but soon feels repetitive with nearly every building looking similar. 

After everything goes tits up on the campsite and you've acquired another survivor on route you're off into the big bad world to just survive. I'm sure that there is an inbuilt story, it's starting to build, there's good guys and bad guys knocking around, a tyrannical judge who has anointed herself in charge of the situation and a military who are trying to keep order at the end of the world that started off more interested in evicting squatters and taking my guns but are now warming to me after a few favours. It's not a bad stab at an end of the world narrative, with so many others out there it does feel fresher than if they had started us off in a prison and we had to fight off the "Governor" however, I was just getting myself more and more frustrated with the NPC's, it seems that in the world of State Of Decay no-one appears to have ever seen a zombie film and are quite happy to repeat all the mistakes of 28 Days Later, Dawn of the Dead, Land of the Dead etc... 

There's also a stab at some kind of emotional arc for your own "home" having to council other survivors if they are scared or angry by heading out into the wilderness with them to have a bit of fun with a cricket bat. At one point you even having to put one or two of them down after they become infected. However, what would be a harrowing job in real life never really feels all that bad as you have never had any time to actually bond with other survivors as you're constantly out on the road trying to complete missions and gather tins of beans.

All of this aside State Of Decay would still be an amazing game even with all these faults. However, it stretches further than some ropey dialogue and repetitive gameplay. There are constant glitches in the gameplay, often zombies get stuck in the floor or walls while coming to get you and simply charge around like a toddler on Novocain. Frequently a mission will require you to clear an area of zombies where what it means is kill the zombies that started in the area; often after five minutes of hacking and slashing one of them has wandered off bored that he isn't getting some brain bashing attention and is now hiding well away from the area and you have to spend ages trying to find him.

Also, the missions in State Of Decay appear on the map as quickly as they disappear. With so much going on at once it's hard to keep up with things that you need to do and what is going to disappear first and thus needs immediate attention. Often something that you're about to attend to (a supply run) is wiped off the map as it's too late for the materials when you've spent the last ten minutes trying to save another survivor - in my mind a much more important task. However, over the airwaves you're still scolded for your negligence and lose some group moral. It doesn't matter that you've managed to save the only doctor everyone really needed that supply of wooden boards that apparently have an expiration date of ten minutes time.

I'm thinking that my main grievance with State of Decay is that I was expecting The Walking Dead and got something along the lines of GTA or Mercenaries. I wanted a complex look at societal breakdown and human relationships when the end was coming, whereas what I got was an excuse to enjoy a bit of hack and slash with some RPG elements thrown in (I can imagine that the latter is both cheaper and easier to programme). It isn't that State Of Decay is a bad game it's just that I had bigger expectations going into it that I should have for something that costs 1600 MSP (£15). For what it is it fills the market and is actually quite an enjoyable little romp that I'm sure will keep me entertained for a few months of dipping in and out before I finally snap and start taking a shotgun to anything that looks like it might break.

Ultimately State Of Decay is a huge expansive world which has great depth and a massive amount of options and paths for the player to take and is the best take on the end of days sandbox survival 'em up that we've ever seen. It's just that I want more and with the obvious success that the game is going to be expect big things in the future with expansion packs and the obvious co-op mode that will follow! That's when the real fun can begin and we really will find out whose "plan" is the best.