State of Decay 2 offers a miserable game experience
Zombies are nowadays an indispensable part of games. In one game, however, it works just a bit better than with the other. In State of Decay 2 the picture is quite right. The world has once again fallen prey to the zombies and the last survivors try to make the best of it. However, the zombies are the least of your problems in this game.
That basic principle is unchanged in State of Decay 2 . The game still has no break and runs the world (albeit a bit slower) when you’re not playing. Your survivors can also die again (definitively) and it is therefore of great importance that you consider who you are using for what and which people will play a crucial role for your base.
When you start the game you first have to make a choice from two people with whom you want to start the game. All persons you can choose have different characteristics (endurance, strength, etc.) and skills (carpenter, gardener, IT person, etc.) who can help you with specific tasks in the game. When you play for the first time, this will not say much, but gradually the game will soon mark which skills were useful and what you should find in people you can save in the game and add to your community. Finally you choose a starting zone (there are a total of three different zones) and you can get started. Big improvement in terms of zones is that there are now three instead of one folders in the original game. Changing zones can only be done later in the game, but in itself, it does not matter where you start.
How do you not mean killing zombies?
Ok, you can finally start the game. Where are those zombies to slaughter? Well, they are there, but it is absolutely not the intention that you run around like crazy and zombies start to fall. As I said before, this is a survival game and it is mainly about surviving and having enough stock for your survivors. That the zombies sometimes stand in a bad way and they still have to die, well, that’s part of it.
Your community starts small and it is vital that you complete missions that ensure that you get new survivors in your base. Yes, that does mean that you have to build larger stocks, but you do need defense and other characters to play with when one is pulled in two by a Juggernaut zombie. It is also important that you keep your community happy. All persons want other things and you have to find a good balance here.
Safety is number one, so making sure your environment stays free of zombie hurdles is important. You will also have to plan how you organize your base. There are a number of options in terms of extensions such as a sickbay, kitchen garden or workshop. However, you have limited space and you have to choose what you want to arrange in your base and what you will have to deal with in the open world or exchange with other communities. This is actually the most important of the game and zombies remain a kind of side issue.
There is a story in the game where you are hurling at the back, but this is also more focused on simply surviving on the three zones and reaching the finish line. So do not expect too much of this and understand that it is mainly focused on discovering and side missions. It can even become somewhat monotonous if you have to do a lot of the same runs for stocks.
Do not expect the game to take you by the hand. The game has a fairly brief explanation and the basic principles are explained in a number of lines of text. So you have to invent the rest. Not that everything is very complicated, but for someone who has not played the original, I can imagine that it is really puzzling and that it frustrates when you find out that you have made many wrong choices for your base. This could have done something better for the developer.
Russian Roulette
But it is a zombie game, where I do not have to kill zombies? Oh yeah, you’re really going to kill thousands of them. Or is it killing, considering they are already dead? Anyway, there are a lot of zombies around the world that you can tackle in various ways. You have melee weapons, rifles, and explosives. You will also be able to plow the larger groups of zombies by going through it with your car.
However, there are a number of special zombies such as the Feral, the Juggernaut and the Plague nests which require more tactics. Especially with the special zombies, I ran into the problem that the gameplay mechanics work against. Fighting with melee weapons is fine, aiming with guns a little less, but the explosives is really Russian roulette. Several times I realized that I just wanted to simply advance, but the grenade miraculously just in front of my feet or even behind me, which often caused chaos and ended several times in perma-death of one of my characters. I do not know who has developed this, but it does not deserve much good.
Unfortunately, you will encounter more of this kind of weird things in the game. What I also often did is that, on the run from zombies, I saw a door open and I wanted to run in quickly. However, I ran into an invisible wall, because the game visually indicated that the door was open, but the code behind it really said that the door was closed. I have also died several times because of this.
Add to this that there are still a lot of glitches in the game and you occasionally fall through rocks and get stuck and that I had about 15 times a game crash in a 25 to 30 game time and you know enough. Technically, the game is unfortunately as bad as it can be. It was not that great in the original game, but then I could partially condone it because it was an innovative game and I went into the game world. The developer had promised two-part improvement, but nothing is less true. The game also performs graphically below current standards.
What’s new and nice is that you can now play in co-op with four men. You can invite people to your world or visit someone else’s world. However, it adds, except that you go out together, nothing extra to the game in terms of story or missions. Unfortunately again a case of fun that it is there, but had much more resident.
So it is definitely an interesting game, but unfortunately, it is plagued by bugs and sloppiness. I still think it’s a great game, how the world works and how you can survive in different ways is fun. The good is, however, heavily overshadowed by the mistakes in the game and I can not help but refuse the game at the moment until there are quite a few patches released to correct all this so that it is at least reasonably playable.