AWKWARD ZOMBIE

By far, the noisiest containers I've ever seen. Lookit that, a State of Decay topic! Because I can't stop making topics that nobody uses!.. moving along.

Uhm... it's definitely not the best zombie game out there, for a number of reasons, but that's really an achievement it doesn't want. To me, SoD remembered the number one rule when it comes to making a game of any genre or caliber: make it fun to play. I haven't had this much fun killing zombies since I found a cymbal-banging monkey with an al Qaeda jihad vest! It's a decent game with a fun albeit used premise, and the way it's executed really gives you a sense of multiple-character immersion- the likes of which, I've never seen before.

One of my survivors is a former police officer, and admits in his profile traits that he still is an officer of the law at heart. Will he bust you for bringing food back to the safehouse from a ransacked property? No. Will he come to your rescue with his bitchin' bolt-action rifle and tonfa baton? Yes he will, and will kick booty. This is how I felt the second I took control of him, and was compelled to respond ASAP to distress calls and friends in need of rescue halfway across the map, even if that meant abandoning my current hunt- the prize of which was in the building right in front of my car.

State of Decay is a very fun game with serious longevity, awesome combat mechanics (when was the last time you dropkicked a zed in the face?) a myriad of weapons to be found (99 motherfucking guns), driving elements to justify the map's HUGE span of 20+ square kilometers of mixed terrain, several towns and a county's worth of provinces to explore, sympathetic characters with various ups and downs... let's just say with a little polish, this game would be well worth the standard $60 retail price, making its current $20 price a steal. I'd give it an 8.3 out of 10, and recommend anybody who likes good games with a 360 to get it!

All that said, it is still a low 8... for certain, very jarring reasons. Be ye forewarned, SoD enthusiasts, for everything to follow is true.

• [DRIVING] The driving physics are very simplistic. There's very little traction loss, meaning only the fastest cars can e-brake into a 180- everything else is just turning and stopping. Driving works for sure, and it's easy to get comfortable with it, but... despite that you rarely ever need it, the inability to swing or use your vehicle's weight and momentum to its utmost potential is counterintuitive to fancy driving, which can make it seem almost boringly straight-forward. Given the game's topic, it might be justified in saying the driver/player-character is too focused on survival to want to do anything like drifting.

• [DRIVING] Some vehicles are ridiculously fragile. Again, it's something that can be justified within the game's mechanics: there's cars everywhere of all different types with different stats and practical purposes, and the devs need to encourage us to use them. The threat of losing a car permanently to breakdown and/or explosion doesn't hold much weight if they don't break, but an old-school muscle car complete with hood-elevated engine, or a 30s-style pickup with reinforced pure-steel frame and chassis, would not start belching smoke from running over an anorexic dead chick. Nor would its tires pop if it backed into a gigantic fat fuck!

• [DRIVING] I'm pretty sure I mentioned this elsewhere, but it bears repeating. If you gain airtime at an angle (aka tilting) and your bodykit hits ground before the wheels, no matter how impossible the angle- e.g. pole-vaulting its own front corner the long way, despite its very slow lift and weak upward inertia? It's going to flip over. I've flipped cars for the most ridiculous reasons at the slowest speeds, and once it lands on its roof, you have anywhere between fifteen and thirty seconds to find another car, T-bone the flipped car, and pray you hit it hard enough to roll but not enough to blow up, and it's not as cooperative correcting itself as it is turning over like a dog playing dead. If you can't flip it fast enough, or if there's no supplimentary car in immediate range to do it, it's gone. Unlike GTA, turning towards the ground does not convert the force or transfer the energy into a manageable direction to level out your car; where SoD does follow GTA in lock-step is their patented "upside-down cars spontaneously combust and explode" mechanic. DRIVING!!!

• [DRIVING] Last one in this category, I swear. Any good survivor will realize early on that in terms of overall speed, handling, toughness, and survivor capacity, the Modern Pickup (looks like a GMC Sierra) is the best vehicle in the game. It has space for six survivors (four in the crew cab, two in the bed), can withstand a hell of a lot of punishment, gets you from A to B in good time, and handles like a modern-day utility pickup should. Now if you're smart and remember the "cars stay where you leave them" gimmick, you'll get the idea to gather as many of these trucks together as you can at your home base for collective use, letting the idle ones occupy a nearby parking lot while busted ones are repaired in machine shops spaces. Sounds good, right? Having a whole dealership's worth of Sierras on standby to use in any situation? TOO BAD WHEN YOU DO THAT, SOME ASSHOLES IN YOUR GROUP THINK IT'S HILARIOUS TO STEAL THEM, DRIVE THEM SOMEWHERE RANDOM OF NO VALUE, ABANDON THE TRUCK, HIKE BACK HOME IN A ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE, ARRIVE EMPTY-HANDED MEANING THE TRIP WAS FOR NOTHING, AND NOBODY DECIDES TO TELL YOU THAT IT'S HAPPENING, WHERE THEY LEFT THE TRUCK, WHO DID IT, WHY, OR IF THE TRUCK EVEN STILL FUCKING EXISTS. Hilarious, right?! So despite the game's stockpile-hoard-preserve motif, gathering up useful vehicles somehow came off as so detrimental to the developers, they threw in the "Joy Ride" event! AND THERE'S NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT... in all fairness, I just got the idea to leave a truck at each of my outposts, which seemed smarter than having them all in one place anyway.

• [QUEST] As the de facto leader of your survivor group, regardless of your current character, you can call in orders over the radio- for example, if you think that gas station across the way would make for a great outpost to keep watch on the nearby bridge with firebombs, you can call it in and it becomes a larger, permanent safe zone on the map, complete with with a supply locker that gives you access to everything at home (although you can't drop rucksacks there, because nobody tangible occupies these safehouses). You can also call in people to pick up stashes ("rucksacks") of medicine, food, ammunition, construction materials, and fuel that you can't pick up (either due to already having a rucksack or not having time). You can only do this if there's a stash for certain, which you'd think you've earmarked after discovery. Apparently not, because once the runner arrives, they meander about for several minutes checking out every container you've already emptied, find the actual package you need taken home, and walk away. There's the option to "assist" them when they show up, which you'd think makes it even faster. No. Instead, it becomes an infestation mission that until all the incoming zombies spawn and are killed, they will not complete the gathering process no matter how safe they are, instead running around barracading windows when the zeds are already chewing on them, and standing around if there are no windows to be boarded or zombies to be maimed. Granted, it's not entirely as bad as I make it sound (they DO fight and are pretty good at helping you out), but it takes a while for you to figure out the futility. What makes it worse is the arbitrary "Gathering" meter, which means absolutely nothing and might as well be an objective statement saying, "Kill all the zombies." It has nothing to do with actually defending the runner in any practical fashion, it serves as a trap quest to waste your time, and puts both of you at risk because runners left to their own devices are at least capable of avoiding danger. I'm serious, I've seen lone runners walk through a horde without so much as being looked at. Speaking of "lone" runners, did I mention you can only call out one at a time, and they have to run all the way from home base?

• [AI] Picture this: your starting character, Marcus, is perfect after a while. Clearly the best person you'll ever have, easily achieving 7-star Cardio, Wits (looting), Fighting, Shooting, Leadership, and Powerhouse. He's built like a brick shithouse, capable of making several conscutive medium-range scavenger trips before starting to feel fatigued. He can fight zombies longer and harder than trained Armed Forces infantry, crushing the skulls of zeds with his axe through their ballistic helmets, and can sprint longer with a rucksack of munitions on his back than most survivors can unencumbered. He's a natural mediator and can be seen as the figure of authority in your community. His friend Ed Jones, who's a very passive and supportive person that's known Marcus for a long time, is a comical optimist who provides literal comedy relief the likes of which haven't been seen since Seth Green in the Austin Powers movies. He spends his days covering for Marcus when he's too exhausted, is pretty good at marksmanship and brawling with a wrench, and would naturally be the entertainer around home base! Maya Torres, the resident Army grunt with nerves of steel, is a crackshot and no-nonsense team player willing to take on a horde to save her friends. She picks off Ferals at great distances with sidearms and turns hunting rifles into tools more lethal than they ought to be. She manages the watchtower shifts, authorizes use and creation of weaponry and ammo, and is on top of the situation when the safehouse is under threat. These three people are the definitive trio of your group. Then Lily, the radio operator, calls you to say that Ed's become depressed and is picking on people in his sleep, Maya is incapable of hunting the one-shot-kill Rotter standing absolutely still out in the open by herself, and Marcus is holed up somewhere in a shed in your safezone cowering before the terrifying forces of nothing. Meanwhile, hail to that frumpy, gossiping, unemplyoyed drunk lady who's a known coward (complete with profile trait stating as much), has terrible cardio because she smokes a pack of cigarettes every day near the pumps at your gas station, can't fight worth a shit, and would sooner call you a faggot than help in the garden. She's an upstanding model of life who apparently lead the way in defeating several inbound threats to the home base!

As mean as I've been to this game here, you really do have to nitpick and focus on these little things to make them seem at all significant; during gameplay, they're far less noticeable and subtract nothing from the fun. In my experience, State of Decay is a mixed bag, but they're all goodies jumbled in that bag and I'd eat every one of them that I pulled out. *bad analogy* You can say it looks ugly, you can bitch that it's not as shiny as Resident Evil 5 or as functional as Call of Duty, but it really doesn't matter. What's important is that it WORKS, and the devs managed to cobble together something amazing. I'd pick State of Decay over any other zombie game I've played to date, in a heartbeat, and it's one of the better twenty bucks I've ever spent. I highly recommend State of Decay, try it out.

my friend has been going bonkers over how great this game is. It's hitting PC sometime soon, right?

Yep, on Steam. I'm guessing it'll come already patched. Remember, this is part of the era when we don't own a physical copy of anything, but thankfully, my edisconnect Xbox can't be controlled.