There are times when State of Decay 2 is so buggy that it stops being
a stodgy post-apocalyptic looting game and transforms into metatextual
horror theatre. At one point during a fight outside a barn, a juggernaut
zombie hits me so hard that the UI vanishes, as though punched clean
out of my character's skull. I try to speak to another human faction
leader later, selecting unseen dialogue options at random, and
accidentally trigger a civil war. The game features an extravagant array
of injury types, from torn discs to punctured organs, and I half-wonder
whether the developer is actually simulating the effects of a head
wound through the very interface. How long will it last? Is this some
unlockable hardcore option I'm not aware of?
I reload the save and, thank goodness, there's the aiming cursor,
but I have other problems to worry about. Doors that seem open won't let
me enter. Zombies keep falling out of midair in the distance, as though
the Hand of God were literally sowing a wayward planet with the seeds
of annihilation. I jump into a car to go clear out a nearby infestation,
and the camera develops a Velma Dinkley complex, standing in confusion
while I disappear into the sunset. Is the camera, too, falling prey to
the zombie curse? Another reloaded save, and now my AI companion has
become a ghost - he's visible only on the game's minimap as a
teleporting icon who yells in my ear, shaking my nerve far more
efficiently than the ghouls that roam the hillsides. I fire up online
co-op to escape and, oh crikey, now the audio has caught the gremlins
too - I can hear the twangy country soundtrack but when I clobber
somebody it sounds like I'm beating a snowman. A plague of silence!
Isn't there something in the Bible about that? I quit the session to
look it up and, perhaps mercifully, the game crashes.
All this on top of more continuous, less dramatic flaws - cars that
occasionally jump skyward like startled cats when you nudge anything at
greater than walking speed, vicious online latency, lighting glitches
and a tendency for characters to get stuck on objects that has obliged
the presence of an actual "free rewind" option. There's something almost
exhilarating about State of Decay 2's sheer brokenness, the way it
limbos under the launch-window bar set by Mass Effect: Andromeda - but
alas, sooner or later the clouds part and you're left with the mere
tedium of the game within.
Like the 2013 original, State of Decay 2 sees you raising a
backwoods community in a zombie-overrun United States, outfitting a
homestead with cropfields, guard towers and the like while combing
pleasantly ramshackle farms, factories and high streets for resources,
weapons and procedurally generated survivors. Each survivor is, in
theory, a distinct personality, with an initial level of fitness,
firearms expertise and melee capability that levels up automatically,
plus a set of vocational skills (e.g. computing) and personality traits
(e.g. a penchant for goofing around that cheers people up while lowering
productivity). You control them one at a time, switching mostly at
will, with the option to enlist another character as escort or pack
mule.
As with the first game, the hook here is presiding over a motley
gang of uniquely damaged refugees, drawn from all walks of life and prey
to all the usual human graces and foibles: real people doing what real
people do when shit meets fan. Survivors aren't appealing to the eye -
they look like the trackside crowds in Forza and animate like flowerpot
men - but they are quite fun to think about, as you sort the good eggs
from the liabilities, and try to ensure that each character spends
enough time in your hand to acquire decent survival experience.
When left at home, characters will heal, recover from fatigue and
fend off the odd zombie raid; they'll also broach the odd side mission
and raise concerns about base facilities or supplies that feed into an
overall community morale level. Should morale sink too low, your
survivors may squabble with each other or even up and leave, assuming
they don't expire of malnutrition first. It's a setup that takes
inspiration from both society simulators like Dwarf Fortress and the
sorry cast of The Walking Dead, and there's a lot of detail to chew
through, on paper. Among the new features is the option to appoint a
leader, which creates an endgame objective - e.g. help every other human
group you meet, or become regional warlord - based on that character's
worldview.
All of that engrossing specificity is soon forgotten,
however, because like so many open worlds, State of Decay 2 is much more
about things, property and busywork than it is about people. One key
problem is that in practice, you are the world's only moving part. Aside
from throwing tantrums and randomly producing the odd consumable item,
survivors essentially do nothing when not under your control - they
won't even shut the base gate to keep the undead out. Their theoretical
quirks and desires are mostly apparent in the aggregate, a question of
+1 this and -3 that on the community stats screen. Moreover, their lack
of agency means that the core problem of securing vital supplies is down
to you around the clock, which means you rarely have leisure to
consider each character's nuances, such as they are. Instead, you'll
burn through them like rechargeable batteries, scraping together all the
loot you can with one before leapfrogging to the next.
The pressure of resource acquisition lessens with time - you can
once again turn surrounding buildings into outposts that drip food,
meds, fuel, building materials and ammo into your coffers. But by then,
you'll also have trained much of the distinctiveness out of your
followers, upgrading both the strong and the weak into more or less the
same, omni-proficient fighter-scavenger. In this regard, the game falls
into a familiar irony for the zombie genre: it reviles the zombies as a
brute collective, as mere vengeful matter, while disregarding the way
its systems reduce the living to interchangeable objects themselves.
The process of squelching the zeds, meanwhile, feels largely
unaltered from 2013. You'll thwack away till your stamina runs out, lob
the odd explosive or distraction item and conserve your ammo for nastier
threats like the screamers, who loiter to the rear of their groups
bawling for back-up. Returning special undead such as pouncing ferals
and boss-tier juggernauts aside, you'll now have to worry about plague
zombies, whose attacks infect characters and ultimately turn them into
zombies themselves. This is a source of trepidation early in the game,
but the ingredients for a cure prove easy to come by - just loot dead
plague zombies for tissue samples. You'll also find samples inside
Plague Hearts, knots of pulsing crimson that randomly populate each
map's buildings, where they act as the focus for short-lived wave
survival missions. Destroying one of these makes all the others a bit
tougher, but your tactics in each case are identical - throw stockpiled
explosives at the thing while an ally distracts its zombie entourage, or
just toss firecrackers around to amuse the horde while you blast away
with an appropriately meaty rifle.
Another new wrinkle is the possibility of conflict with other human
survivor enclaves, who occupy their own safehouses around each map and
entertain variable views of the player, largely depending on how many
oddjobs you've done for them. The game tries to squeeze a bit of drama
from your interactions with these groups - some of your own followers
will object to you helping them, and no battle between humans is
complete without your character tutting at the iniquity of your actions,
often while halfway through the act of caving somebody's face in. It's
not long, however, before all this is swallowed up in the core loop of
scrounging and crafting, and all your smoothskin neighbours become just
another set of nagging voices on the radio. Armed with guns and healing
items of their own, hostile survivors are more of a threat than most
zombies, especially after sunset when the AI's unexplained night vision
comes into play - but they're hardly Rainbow Six and, in any case, they
don't respawn.
For all its rawness and tedium, State of Decay continues to be a
game of occasional sparkle. The maps - there are now three, descending
from the mountains to forested valleys - are crude of geometry and beset
by streaming problems, but elevated by a rich yet faded, handworn
palette. There's a lovely sense of organic disorder to many of the
building interiors, with tupperware, shirts and busted tellies strewn
all over. It just about sates that quintessentially video game desire to
revel in a world's downfall, though you learn to home in on the
interactive objects. As in the first title, while searching a structure
you have the option of holding a button to speed up, at the risk of
dropping something and attracting marauders. It's a nifty risk-reward
dynamic, reminiscent of power reloads in Gears, that creates tension
when you're in a rush to get home before darkness falls.
None of that's nearly enough to save the game, however, even if
you're new to the series. State of Decay 2 is a poor return on the
scruffy promise of its predecessor, which topped Xbox Live Arcade charts
largely, I suspect, for its resemblance to DayZ. It tantalises with the
thought of raggedy everyday heroes pooling their myriad talents to
survive, only to quantify and busywork all that out of existence. Its
resource and scavenging elements are as suffocating as its social
elements are underplayed. It's saying quite a lot that the bugs, in the
end, are the things I remember most strongly about it - accidental
windows upon an experience that is less sluggish and dreary and, well,
less of a zombie.
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