Dead State Review

The RPG Codex has published a lengthy review of Dead State, DoubleBear Productions’ turn-based zombie apocalypse RPG. For the most part the review is positive, though the UI and the overall balance were sore points for the writer.

A snippet on non-combat gameplay:

** Base and personnel management. As the leader of the shelter, it falls to you to make sure that everyone is fed and happy, and that the building is secure from attack by zombies and looters. This means that in addition to selecting a team and leading the scavenging expeditions personally, it is your responsibility to allocate available labor to various other jobs and duties, from building fortifications and shelter upgrades, to standing guard, to synthesizing antibiotics. Even taking a day off to watch DVDs on the couch is a “job” you can assign to boost the morale of a stressed out ally. This is all done through a very simple and easy to use “Job Board” interface. (I wish the Board would stop reordering my worker list, though. Glitch!)

At first, assigning jobs seems bare bones and without much potential, as you don’t have much choice of assignments with just a few people available, but as more survivors join the shelter, it gets much more fun and involved.

The decision-making process in assigning and equipping your scavenging party and choosing a travel mode (foot, horse, or car) is interesting, logical, and relevant. You need to balance such factors as carrying capacity, fuel consumption, time spent traveling to and from the shelter, mechanical capability (for quietly opening locked doors), medical capability, survival skills (for finding foragable food), melee combat capability, ranged combat capability, damage resistance vs. zombies and melee, and damage resistance vs. gunfire. Phew! A group of unarmored marksmen on horseback will perform differently in the field than a team of heavily armored sledgehammer specialists driving the car, or a more well-rounded team built to handle whatever comes up. On top of that, you need to consider the shelter’s noncombat labor needs you can’t take your top mechanic into the field if she’s needed that day to repair the refrigerator. Lastly, there’s always the possibility that an ally will be unavailable on a given day due to illness or other personal reasons. If your best sniper gets sick, you’ll have to pick someone else to cover your back for a while. Coping with all of these decisions made me feel very involved with everyone in the shelter.

** Personal dialogues and shelter Crisis Events. Of course, there are occasional dialogues during encounters in the field, with fight/flight/befriend type options and some information gathering. What you might not expect is the battery of dialogues that occurs in the safety of the shelter each morning. The people living at the school often drop by your “office” for various reasons – sometimes to let you know that they’re too sick to work, or even just to say hi and talk the current situation over. Other times, they may bring concerns about other characters, such as a daughter worried about her parent being endangered in the field, or a victim of harassment coming to you for help.

There are also many confrontations between allies to be found elsewhere in the shelter during this phase, such as someone accusing someone else of cheating at cards, or picking a fight with them, or even asking them on a date.

You are given the opportunity to participate in these conversations or merely observe, and the outcomes of all of these incidents may affect individual morale, shelter morale, and/or character attitudes towards your PC or each other. Sometimes, speaking to an ally can even alter the course of their development discussing the need for security may cause an ally to focus on their shooting abilities, for example, while emphasizing the need for food may inspire them to become a better farmer.

And a quote from the writer’s conclusions:

Bottom line! Should you buy it? I want to say yes to immediately put money in DoubleBear’s coffers. The honest answer: wait for the balance patch that makes this the survival game with hard decisions it was meant to be. Then pay full price it’ll be worth it.

At the end of the day, Dead State is not the perfect RPG yet but there is a lot to love about it and a lot to be impressed by. The good news is that the foundation of the game is sound. Individual gameplay elements function well, and if rebalanced properly, this could become a truly historic title.