state of decay: year-one survival edition

You have a group of survivors, some playable, some not, and you can expand this group by rescuing stranded survivors or joining forces with another group. You have a 12 square mile chunk of rural American valley to explore, complete with farmsteads, mountains, campsites and three small towns. It’s The Walking Dead with a sunny disposition.Ī seed of greatness was always there in the original 2013 Xbox and PC release, mostly because State of Decay’s systems are so elegant and cleverly constructed. Yet this isn’t a bleak, nihilistic tale of undeath, mass carnage and man’s inhumanity to man, but a zombie game where community is all-important where banding together, saving others, protecting your neighbours and sharing resources is as vital to survival as the ability to put a fire-axe through a skull. Death is permanent, even if the story carries on with new survivors. There are no superhuman heroes, no crafting crazy weapons out of garden tools and kitchen gadgets and – most importantly – no cheap checkpoints to fix your dumb mistakes. State of Decay isn’t your usual zombie game. She went down, another source of meat for the hungry biters. Even a stellar fighter with an impressive combat ranking honed over several hours of play couldn’t manage the numbers. Yet she still went on a dangerous mission without a back-up weapon, leaving her all too vulnerable when her machete shattered while holding off the walking dead. An Army veteran, she should have known the risks and how to handle them. Alone yet oddly defiant, he was literally torn apart. Swamped by slavering, clawing flesh-eaters, he did his best to escape but stumbled in the darkness and failed to make it over a crumbling wall. Who knows what he was doing, investigating a mysterious radio signal in the dead of night, searching ruins in close proximity to a restless zombie horde? He snuck inside, searching for the source, but one slip was all it took to earn the horde’s attention.

State of decay: year-one survival edition