I am very disappointed with State of Decay.
You all probably remember it having a big stir back at what, to me, feels like the height of the Walking Dead/zombie fiction craze. It feels almost surreal how long ago it was; there's still a million trash indie zombie games every day clogging up Steam, but I don't feel like people really CARE about zombies anymore. It was inescapable back then. The only zombie game I actually played was Dying Light, but in the last three years (and boy did those fly by) that I started playing on PC I've played Days Gone and Dead Rising, and I have an interest in Project Zomboid.
State of Decay was basically hyped to hell and back as The Walking Dead: The Game. So does it achieve it? Fuck no.
I won't beat it down for being low production value in the sense of being a AAA game capable of high graphical fidelity. I will beat it down for not even being all that good for that. Everything about it feels cheap and janky, including gameplay design. You have an ugly washed-out and generic map of Washington's countryside (makes such a contrast to Days Gone's Oregon), Generic County, USA, consisting essentially of two small towns and one big one separated by a stretch of open cropland and a bunch of zombies spazzing out like it's a Unity game. The map is deceptively small. It is, admittedly, extremely dense, and that's probably why it's small; somebody had to program it up that every single building was explorable, and unlike a Bethesda game, this is seamless exploration with every window being a door. Nonetheless, it's small, quite believable but without personality. Plot-wise, it starts as the most painfully generic thing in the world (sarcastic quips like a Marvel movie), but it does start to get better over time. But not by much at all. Later in the game I kept preparing with a feeling of dread for the Big Fight (TM) and then the Big Fight (TM) never came. Where challenge comes it comes because several things in the overworld when wrong all at once: you got gangbanged by two infestations instead of one, you drew a feral and a juggernaut down on you at the same time, that kind of thing. And everything in this game goes back to killing zombies. I know that probably sounds like a retarded complaint, but in other games you'd have different kinds of scenarios thrown at you, or possibly some sort of minigame. It would vary things, at least contextually, and it would have a variety of tools for you to use and different reasons to use said different tools in different scenarios. Dying Light and Dead Rising also boil down to killing zombies over and over, but they don't get boring due to a fascinating movement system and a sandbox to fuck around in a goofy, old-fashioned way respectively.
I'm going to focus my bitching on two areas (characters and territorial control) and my half-hearted praise on one (the theming). Survival mechanics are mostly a matter of balancing; I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with the ideas behind the base system and the five core resources, but there isn't enough pressure in the game for it to matter. Good example of an extraneous mechanic being made irrelevant through bad balancing.
With characters, you run into a problem I complained of in the Paradox thread that nobody has made a game like Crusader Kings 2 (which came out around the same time) since. Nobody seems to have understood the special mix of design concepts that made those characters feel alive. Thinking on it more, what really matters is emergent gameplay. Characters need to be defined by their traits, need to be important to the game, but also need to be active agents whose own motivations and capabilities make them both sources of conflict and cooperation in a shifting web of social alliances. For State of Decay, it's not about being the Zombie Dictator; most of it should be cooperation. But a big chunk of The Walking Dead, really the whole point, is Zombie Soap Opera. Characters in SoD can have moods, yet I never saw what moods DO mechanically. They can get angry and sad and depressed, and all it does is just trigger bad events that can be shrugged off, and how do you cure it? Well, of course you go kill zombies. Even within the framework of "kill shit" they could have varied the theming of it, like hunting down a memento or gift for the character. These people up and disappear on you and have to be rescued, but without a reason, nothing is simulated about life at the base. You erect outposts, but the outposts are unmanned. (What if it had been that the outposts were manned, and that's WHEN people tend to go missing, because sometimes they get swarmed?) They're more or less immune when riding shotgun with you. In all, it's a lifeless world of drones. The biggest thing going for it is that they do have voiced lines; there's a limited number of voices for the illusion of variety, and that works fine. But even then, it comes at the cost of imposing one personality on everyone. What you will not see in this game is the exploration of how different people respond to chronic stress in the end of the world, and how that drives their social conflict in a small, prehistoric-like band, dealing with other tribes out there, potentially fracturing over very personalistic politics and differences of strategy. That's The Walking Dead.
And since the missions are so minimalist and all play the same, what really comes to attention, and kind of proves how shit it is, is the way the game does these radiant quests about dealing with zombies. As I take it, making noise increases zombie spawns in a general area, Infestations (that pop up randomly near your base) further worsen this and lead to more hordes spawning, hordes wander with purpose and if you have too many hordes they converge on your base for a siege. Outposts allow you to access your storage through a magic bag of holding like in most games and also (along with "clearing," ie tediously walking through every room of, a building) prevent zombie spawns in the area (with clearing, it's temporary). You can barricade up windows. You can call in support (influence is your money, both within the group and outside; your relationship with a specific group just acts as a discount on their support; unfortunately, the plot takes away all of the good influence sinks, leaving you nothing to do with it) to clear out buildings.
None of this works well. For example, say you want to clear a home. If you have your ally clear it, it will spawn zombies because zombie attacks are not something that happens emergently from zombie migration patterns, zombie attacks are things that trigger because we're playing the Scavenge this Building minigame (TM). So I think, I'll clear it, barricade all windows, and then we can set it out. But the problem is that it's based not on a floorplan of the building, but on a circle radius. Zombie wanders up to your door, your retard fucking ally stops scavenging until you kill them. Choosing support here only makes your job harder, and the cherry on top is that while you can store the goodies in cars around town until your storage is below the cutoff to accept it, the AI won't know to do that. There was one story mission with a fun siege where it felt like CoD World at War zombies, and I never saw something like that happen again. Board up a house? It can become as infested as any other. Knock down an infestation? Another one pops up. Hunt the exotic zombies? From what I read, that doesn't actually stop/reduce their spawns. It is all such piss in the wind.
Edit: I meant to say, the gist of my bitching is that it would have been nice if barricading did a damn thing for the player. I thought, maybe there ought to be a way to totally block doors with furniture (inside or outside), ways to barricade up (even at the cost of resources) an entire building so that it CAN'T get infested anymore.
What the game does have going for it - what really felt good for a short sweet spot in between the extended intro and the late game set-up to leaving - was the vibe of rebuilding civilization. I love that there are no bandits (that you fight) on the map. State of Decay had this distinct quasi-military vibe to it, and when you play it becomes clear. You have a radio C&C and your party really feels like a well-disciplined unit (then again, having to slowly whip them into shape like one would have been a cool story with the character gameplay...). Other survivors are largely friendly, but they do care about your willingness to help them and your effectiveness. There's a really cool thing with the local Strong Black Woman judge and the sheriff trying to force people to disarm and join their proto-totalitarian society (so basically the slave camp from Days Gone's desert). It goes nowhere. There's a cool thing with the local moonshiner clan racketeering. It goes nowhere. But you do get a sense that you're helping to knit society back together as you link up, erect outposts, build trust (like, once in the game for me) with people to the point they choose to join you, assist your neighbors who still choose to stay outside. But the plot's also going to knock these people down and leave you alone in the end. I suppose I didn't want to leave the valley; I'd rather have been Days Gone's Deschutes County Militia.
It also has one specific type of zombie that made my butthole pucker. The ferals are like zombie tigers. They kind of make noises like tigers, they're ambush predators, they run about on all fours. Most exotics are just the same boring cliches as anywhere else, and I reckon ferals kind of are too, but they're effective. In the whole game, I lost three people (two of them characters with actual stories) on one run, despaired, started from scratch and lost nobody but did have close calls. First death was a duo: your very first starting dude, Marcus, got swarmed while riding shotgun (dumbshit got himself lost, I rescued with him with an underleveled character) and I stupidly engaged a horde out of pure cockiness because the game had been so piss easy up to that point. A short while later, I had a death where, playing as the radio dispatcher's brother, I fell off a fucking ladder and a feral ripped me apart. I made sure to play more conservatively and carefully after that and nothing like that ever happened again; when it got dicey it was due to furious firefights with things like swarms. My favorite characters were two of my starting party. The game kind of just gives you these two great party members right off the bat, so if you don't fuck up horribly (I think it's figuring you will) they can wind up lasting you forever, but leaving no reason but roleplay to use anyone else. Black camper, Marcus, was a "Born Leader" and a "Powerhouse," so I used this mandingo like he was a hero taking on the dangerous jobs and just tearing shit up everywhere. My Mexicana soldier, Maya, I used for the army missions where she gets (in the first few) special dialogue and I roleplayed her as our sort of liaison. To me she kind of became a super commando at the end, fight a feral with a bowie knife between her teeth type.
In all, very mediocre. Could call it a good starting point, but the thing is, I've heard that State of Decay 2 is actually a shallower game.
TLDR State of Decay is piss (even as an indie), just go play Project Zomboid or Days Gone