State of Decay Impressions

The folks at Rock, Paper, Shotgun have cranked out an impressions piece on State of Decay, based on the Early Access build that’s been made available on Steam, and came away decidedly unimpressed. Here’s an excerpt:

When I first played, it was three o’clock in the morning. The game had just installed and I thought I was ready to spend the night with it. Fifteen minutes later, I gave up. A lack of sleep and a sophisticated beer-tasting session had left me unable to follow even the most basic of instructions. I’d failed to find the game’s first waypoint, despite the large arrow on the minimap, and had ended up splashing around in a stream, surrounded by zombies.

The next morning, as I awoke from uneasy dreams, I left all memories of the zombie threat on my pillow. Far more ominous was the memory of that arrow and of the clutter of icons on the minimap, of the busy user interface and attention-hungry tutorial pop-ups. My first approach had been ill-timed and unhelpful but even through bleary eyes, State of Decay’s world hadn’t been quite what I expected.

The abiding memory was of flailing zombies, with glowing eyes, who didn’t seem particularly dangerous or frightening at all. I’d hammered the buttons on my controller and they’d fallen over like bowling pins as I waved a tree branch around and then performed a golf-swing finishing move that took their heads clean off. Later, a character says that only a shot to the head will stop them for good but I was too busy bursting craniums open with my bare fists to pay much attention. It’s entirely possible to kick four or five of the rotters into pieces as they charge, doing a sort of can-can, which immediately makes the word less threatening to inhabit.

There’s often more chance of bodily harm walking through a medium-sized city at 11pm on a Saturday night than there is in State of Decay’s blackest nights. Only one character has died while under my control and that’s because I was surrounded in a house and the camera was stuck behind a fridge so I couldn’t see what was happening. The poor sod still managed to survive for two minutes, dragging herself upright as I repeatedly pressed the ‘˜a’ button, then being pummelled back to the ground.