STATE OF DECAY 2 FIRST HANDS-ON: BIGGER, BETTER, AND MORE RPG-Y
The zombie-apocalypse-survival RPG doubles down on what it does best.
My car was abandoned in the middle of the road somewhere behind me. I couldn’t go back for it even though I desperately wished I could. I had to bail out of it – while it was moving, mind you – because it was the dead of night and I didn’t see the Bloater standing in my path until he exploded on the front bumper, filling the cabin with noxious gas. I was left to limp up and around a mountain, as a straight-line path back to my community’s base just wasn’t possible. My health was critical. My stamina was exhausted because I hadn’t slept in two days and simply couldn’t run more than a few paces anymore. I figured my odds of surviving – and thus not losing valuable geocacher/masseuse Fulgencio Arellano permanently – were barely north of zero. Between my body, my mind, and my situation, I really was in a state of decay.
Such novella-worthy stories are typical in State of Decay 2, the long-awaited sequel to 2013’s smash
Xbox Live Arcade hit. The original was special because it did what other zombie games didn’t: it looked beyond the physical act of beating back hordes of zombies and focused instead on the survivors. It wasn’t a horror game, but if you were to spend enough time thinking about the plight of the community members you were tasked with taking care of, you might have started to think it was. Resources had to be managed, relationship flare-ups had to be mended, and houses needed to be raided – quietly, if you were smart – in order to stay equipped and stay alive.
The sequel, which I spent two days with at Undead Labs’ Seattle development studio, admittedly may not win over anyone who, for whatever reason, didn’t like the original. It is a sequel in the traditional sense, and considering how good the first game was, that’s a good thing here. It’s bigger, prettier, and doubles down on the stuff it did well the first time around. It’s running on a new engine – hello Unreal Engine 4, goodbye CryEngine – a new console, and yes, it’s finally got four-player co-op multiplayer. The only thing it has less of, based on my time with it so far (played exclusively on high-end PCs running at 4k resolution and a steady 30fps), is wonkiness. Sure, I saw my share of the jankiness that the original game could never escape, but State of Decay 2 is already much more smooth, polished, and technically clean than its predecessor – and the team still has a couple months left to polish it. The fact that
it’s priced at $29.99 should buy it a lot of goodwill from gamers, too, even if a bit more wonkiness than desired creeps into the final product.
State of Decay 2’s depth starts with the world. It’s a much bigger one this time around, set some time after the events of the original in a totally different place. I’m told that it loosely ties into the first game, narratively speaking, but you certainly won’t need to play SoD1 to understand the sequel. You need a bigger world, of course, when you have the ability to bring three friends into it to help you out in co-op multiplayer. It works in a fairly unique way we’ll tell you more about later this month, and I spent an entire afternoon trying it out. One quick tip for now: splitting up generally doesn’t end well. But if you’ve gotta go your separate ways, at least bring one friend along. Buddy System FTW!
Next are the characters themselves. They’re procedurally generated, which ensures that not only will every simulation be different, but the possibilities for community personalities are myriad. In my group, Eyman had asthma, which limited his stamina. Zina is a hero – your community members can progress from citizen to leader to hero if you work with them long enough – and thus has a bonus of +1 ammo resource per day for the group. She also has a high pain threshold, which increases her fighting ability and XP rate. “We wanted to integrate characters more fully into the simulation,” said Undead Labs studio head and State of Decay 2 executive producer Jeff Strain. “We wanted to see the effects on your community rather than just [have] RPG stats that affect their standing in the world.” And thankfully, even when your weapons break (and they will, I promise), you’ll never be completely helpless. You’ll always have a screwdriver or similar-caliber stabbing object to give you at least a fighting chance when things go from bad to worse.
Added character depth naturally means that your base building and upgrading mechanics have a lot more to them as well. You can install mods in your facilities, such as “Install Game Console” (fittingly depicted as an original
Xbox) in order to boost morale. You’ll need water outposts, fuel outposts, and power outposts in order to keep your HQ running smoothly. You can temporarily have your farm churn out medicine instead of food in times of crisis. The Resources screen breaks down exactly what all of your various inputs and outputs are, resource-wise. This daunting level of detail may be music to the ears for some, but if you’re overwhelmed at the thought of this, know that everything I saw and played was from a world halfway into the meaty campaign. In other words, you’ll work up to what I saw. Said Strain, “You don't
have to drill way the hell down into all this to succeed and have fun, but you
can.”
Blood Plague Hearts are a big new gameplay focus this time, meant to drive both tension and action. They’re effectively like tiny MMO-style instances – they’ll require all of your wits and skills thanks to the waves of hungry zombies they scream out for after you begin whaling on them – but they’ll leave you with a sense of satisfaction upon completion...and quite likely a case of Blood Plague as well.
Having Blood Plague isn’t so bad, so long as you manage it and, ideally, cure it in time. A meter will start to fill every time you get slashed by an infected zombie, until eventually you just die and turn (thus potentially taking out one or more of your other survivors) if you fail to treat it. Naturally, you can only get Blood Plague samples from certain zombie types, and you’ll need five to fashion the aforementioned cure. Bloaters you already read about, but skitter-on-all-fours Feral, progress-halting Screamers, and hulking Juggernauts are back too.
Increased firepower will help you stem the tide of the apocalypse. Being able to open car doors as you buzz past stray zombies at highway speeds lets you make roadkill in ways that never get old, plus it protects your vehicle’s structural integrity too (oh, and by the way, you have to fill the cars with gas now, lest you run out at the exact wrong time). The ability to now properly crash through fences rather than unrealistically slam into them as if they were concrete barricades should promote the longevity of your rides as well.
Nighttime, I should add, pretty much always qualifies at “the exact wrong time.” The team at Undead Labs have taken special care to make the witching hour and beyond especially terrifying. Yes, the zombies have red eyes at night and yes, they seem a bit more irritable. The day-night cycle has even been made a bit longer than it was in State of Decay 1. But it’s the environment itself that’s been paid special attention. The developers explained how most games have an almost blue-ish nighttime, by design, so that you
can see your surroundings. Undead Labs wanted State of Decay 2 to be a bit more realistic and terrifying of a rural setting, so the black of night is much more
black. It’s not quite can’t-see-your-own-hand-in-front-of-your-face kind of black, but it’s dark enough that a car without headlights on, barreling down the street, might, say, completely miss a Bloater in the middle of the road and end up having to tuck and roll to avoid a cabin full of deadly gas caused by the Bloater living up to its name.
Permadeath, resource management, relationship building, vehicle procurement, maximizing your community’s skills, building outposts, trying to figure out which survivors are friends or foes – all of it and more are what made State of Decay special. And State of Decay 2 deepens all of these systems and more, with the result being a game the Undead Labs team had to peel me away from after I spent two days with it. It’s fair to wonder how it’s going to run on a stock
Xbox One – I only played it on a high-end PC, to which an
Xbox One X should compare nicely – but from what I’ve seen so far, State of Decay 2 may be a steal at $30. And playing it reminded me that, annoyingly, there haven’t been any State of Decay copycats in the five years since the first game. Thankfully, the real thing returns soon enough.
