It’s been a strange week for me. First my wife unexpectedly had to jet off to America with 24 hours notice, to be with family during a difficult time for them, leaving me to fend for myself for ten whole lonely days. And we’ve been exceptionally busy at work making the pilot episode of Smells Like Friday Night for Channel 4 (I’m a camera operator on it), culminating in a long but exciting 18 hour day on Friday.
Oh, and State of Decay, by Undead Labs, was released on Xbox Live Arcade, and it’s fantastic. The first I heard of this game was a couple of months ago when all the gaming sites evidently got a press release and pushed out an obligatory news story on it. I was excited at the description: an open-world zombie apocalypse base-building survival game?
I’M IN!
Oddly, there had been remarkably little marketing for the game. Even in the week of release, you would only have known if you read gaming sites that ran a short news story about it. I saw very little anywhere else, often another sign that confidence was low in the game.
But still, it looked and sounded great. If Undead Labs could pull it off, it could be the game Dead Rising should have been. So when release rolled around this week I dived into the demo as soon as I could.
Oh my God it’s good.
Yes, it’s a bit glitchy. Yes, there’s tearing. Yes, zombies often appear to clip through walls. Yes, graphical pop-in is practically an art-form at times, with scenery, cars and the zed themselves occasionally just materialising right in front of you, or blinking across an entire room without warning. Yes, the tutorial leaves a lot unexplained and the stick sensitivity is too low and it needs a bit of a bugfix for some gameplay stuff (which Undead Labs just confirmed is coming soon).
But none of this really matters once you start playing. State of Decay is the closest thing I’ve ever played to a zombie apocalypse simulator on the Xbox, and until Day Z or The War Z (since renamed) get out of beta or whatever state they’re in right now, it’s the only one I know of, and definitely the only one for the XBOX 360.
The key for me is that it’s so much fun playing it your own way.
Poring over the huge map trying to decide whether to head out to save those strangers who radioed in for help just now, or leave them to their fate while I raid empty houses for badly needed medical supplies and food for my own band of survivors, or go and see what it is that bunch of bombastic army grunts are actually up to, feels real.
Trekking solo across country, crawling most of the way to avoid detection by the roving hordes of zed, spotting a downed aircraft on the horizon just as the sun starts to come up and wondering if it’s worth the significant detour to see if there’s anything of use to plunder, feels real.
And when your character just broke their rusted machete, is down to their last handgun bullets and no silencer, badly needs sleep and medical attention, has no stamina left for a fight, is trying to flee a horde that just noticed them, and stumbles across the path of a feral zombie that in the blink of an eye picks up your weakened form and tears you literally into two… That’s a blow that both you and the survivors back at base camp feel.
(Don’t worry, you switch to a different playable character but you’ll need to level up all their skills again.)
If you have a 360 I highly recommend you download this and get stuck in, and join the 250,000 (and counting) other players around the world that are experiencing their own zombie apocalypse, and surviving it (or not) their way.
UPDATE: 16th June 2013, the first title update for State of Decay is out and as promised fixes a whole bunch of stuff, not least the rampant Infestation warnings. I’ve restarted my botched game and am loving being back amongst the shambling dead.
UPDATE 2: 20th June 2013, well it turns out that first update didn’t work. Apparently it was all there but something got messed up so that when it’s downloaded and applied to the game it doesn’t actually take effect. The good news is that Update 2 is in for approval with MS now and it apparently includes all the fixes from Update 1 and a whole bunch more, and this time it will definitely work. So they say… 😉
