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Decline State of Decay 2 is a cute little trash pile on the side of the road

Borian

Guest


Back in 2013, there was a lot of hubbub about State of Decay 1. It had a long, "promising" early access period. I never much looked into the game. I heard about how buggy it was, and I was additionally zombied-out at the time; it was at the height of The Walking Dead, and during my playthrough of the Telltale Games adaptation. It passed me by. Please, keep in mind while reading this mess that these games were made by a very small indie development studio.

I started playing State of Decay 1 some time around when the second game was released. I have spent way too much goddamn time playing these shit-ass games. I don't like them, but I don't care enough about myself to stop playing them, and they have just the right amount of something to keep me playing them here and there. Specifically, though, I now only play State of Decay 2, which recently I picked up when the Juggernaut update came to Steam. Previously it was a Windows 10 exclusive - just stating that makes me angry. I think I remember the devs stating there was just one thing they had to change so that it could work on Windows 7, but I can't seem to find a citation for that.
There isn't another game like this, first of all. If there was anything similar, I would never touch this game again. What does that mean? Say you're a fan of Dead Island, but the newest game in the series turns out to be ass. There are other games that kinda scratch that itch, such as Dying Light or Dead Rising. There's nothing that scratches the itch this game series gives me. I'm stuck with it. Insert STI joke here.

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Mulu, one of my better characters, practicing her racist Chinese cowboy impression.

This game has a simple loop. Numbers go down, go find thing to make numbers go up. Deal with timed missions before Enclaves leave your region. Deal with regular missions whenever you want to play your video game. Refuel your car so Ferals won't refuel your guro rape fantasies. This game, State of Decay 2, as opposed to its predecessor, does not in fact have lovingly crafted missions! How exciting! Instead, it's what the post game of State of Decay 1 was, where upon getting bored of your current playthrough, you take your old characters and start them on a fresh map with a new base, and your missions are all variations on the same four or five templates, mostly fetch quests. This is not counting your first playthrough of the game, which does have some crafted content for you to go through, but I must admit that the majority of missions consist of the pseudo-procedural missions.

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Pizza medicine bullets bricks gas cans

See that 6/27 on the right? That means you have a limit on the amount of resources you can hold in your base. The first game did not have limits on the amount of resources you could have, and this has a drastic effect on the game. When you go over this limit, you'll have about 15-30 seconds before you start losing the resources you put in, until it gets to the limit.
The developers failed to take into account that you could just store the resources in a spare car until you need them, so it only amounts to more micromanagement. In the first game, you could load your base full of resources so that you could spend more time doing whatever you wanted. With the resource limit in place, you not only have to spend a shitload of time driving back and forth across the overly large and mostly empty maps...
sgX65QG.png

You have no idea how infuriating it is that there's no bridge running across the center of the map. Most of them are built like this, a ring around the edge


... but you also have to be careful how far you go from your base, because while there is an outpost feature - which lets you pick a building anywhere and set up what is basically a teleporting access point to your base's inventory - you have to deliver these vital resources back to your base. The "fix" these devs put in, for what I can only assume is to change how you play the game, only limits what you can do, it reduces the options for an open world game. The devs thought the game would be better by being rid of more options for the player, by forcing the player to play the game in a certain way. So okay, I get it, you want players to go through a specific loop when playing the game, you want them to actually worry about resources. There's a snag, though...

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Mulu wishing an empty ambulance could hold more items than the trunk of a coupe, or even a backpack

Limited vehicle space. So you see, now you get it. You'll spend about 6 boring minutes going from your base to the other side of the map where your mission is. You'll complete that mission, but run out of food back at base, so now you have to go all the way back after looting a few food resources. Also, starting now, I will only refer to food resources as pizzas. Interesting design there, making the game worse so that resources matter more than they did in the previous game.
This is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how much anger this game can build in me. There are so many little things like this, elements that were simply not designed. The first game was a spastic pile of "wouldn't it be cools" slapped together. This game is much of the same, but now there's "we'll fix this by doing this but we'll give it five minutes of thought."

"Enclaves? Outposts? Ferals? Guro rape fantasies? What the fuck are you talking about? What even is this game?"
Wanna know what's fucked up? This game is better than the first. That's right. Despite 10 minutes of doing nothing between bouts of undesigned content and untested combat, the first game was literally just that, too, but this one is even more broken. It's even more stupid than the first was, so it balances out.
The combat in the first game was quite dangerous. The dodge mechanic was unreliable in certain situations. I actually lost a few characters, I think 4. All of them to Ferals. The regular zombies were pushovers- hell, even the bullet sponge fatboi Juggernauts are ezpz compared to Ferals, in both games. Both games are very easy, really.

Ferals. Not many games can be summed up by one of its own enemy types, but the State of Decay series can be. Both games have terrible combat, I don't need to detail much about it. Imagine Dead Rising 1, but slightly better and you got it. But there are a few mechanics that you should be aware of, along with mind-boggling changes from 1 to 2 that should give you a laugh.

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Feral clips through ladder while zomberina rees in the corner

Here's one now. He's the zombie at the bottom of the ladder. This game has 4 special types of Zombies. Ferals, Screamers, Bloaters and Juggernauts. Ferals are almost as fast as a car and can deal near half a lifebar of damage to you if you give them a chance. They'll tackle you in a crowd and deal loads of damage really quickly if you don't focus them.

Oh, here's some Screamers now!

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Armless guys in the corner. They just stand there, reet reeting at Mulu so hard that they create soundwave blurs. Never you mind the horde gathering at the bottom of the ladder

You may think Mulu is in a bit of a bind here, you know, stuck with a horde of zombies below. But it's fine, she has a big gun and a lot of ammo.

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This game has a climbing mechanic, including climbing down. Mulu was so excited about her kills that she decided to jump to her death. Too bad it didn't work - in fact, she suffered no damage at all upon falling to the ground from 45 feet off the billboard

Now wait just a goddamn minute. You may be thinking that this situation is actually kinda funny/fun. If you are thinking that, you're absolutely right. It was fun to get into this situation for the demonstration. I found it a little bit funny as well, just for the jank factor.
What I didn't show was that Mulu had gotten a little bit too low on the ladder just after capturing that first image. A zombie punched her fab cowboy boot and she got so angry about the scuff that she let her hands slide off the ladder, to fall into the crowd. Notice the bottom left, with the pill bottle mysteriously absent. She had to use one to regain some health after failing to dodge one of the Feral's attacks, and a zombie also managed to take a bite out of her cowboy hat. After getting back up onto the billboard, she shot the specials in the head; reet-bois and daddy issues zombie.

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Mulu completely nullifies the zombie horde trope and game mechanic by hopping over a rail, thereby confusing the AI

You probably don't know how incredibly different this is from the first game. In this same situation in the first game, Mulu would have had to wait a long time for the zombies to disperse, so that she could focus down the Feral. I don't feel like checking, but I'm pretty sure you couldn't kill Ferals with a headshot in the first game. In any case, they took loads of damage to kill, and the dodge mechanic completely failed with them because of their tackle mechanic. What that meant for that game was that you always had to have your car nearby, because cars were, and mostly still are in this game, the enemy of Ferals. Cares have been changed in State of Decay 2, but it's not important to talk about. They're a lot weaker in general, depending on difficulty level.
Despite it all, I still find this game fun because of that paragraph below the image. It's janky, it's enjoyable to laugh at, and the broken combat can be genuinely fun. Nothing is all that sacred in this game, so you're free to cheese the hell out of it. Just completely reduce what would become a whole episode in The Walking Dead TV show to a 2 minute encounter with game mechanics so bad that they're both humorous and annoying. You'll feel disappointment and anger and humor and fun within a single encounter like this, and that's why this game isn't throwaway.
In fact... now that I think about it, I think you could headshot Ferals in the first game, but you had to kill them quick because of how much undodgeable damage they did. I might be full of bullshit. I don't care enough to check.
Now that you can simply dodge every attack a feral throws at you, and then instantly kill them with a headshot, the game no longer has any of the moments from the first game, where I'd be walking around and hear a feral coming at me and absolutely lose my shit in panic. Now I just press the C (dodge) key until I can get my reticle on its head, then continue on my way. The dodge mechanics are a can of worms I can dig into for walls and walls. To simplify it, I've never even gotten close to losing a character. Only once, when my car glitched into the ground and exploded, instantly killing my character, but I was able to get her up with the last stand mechanic. I did laugh about that.

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Mulu decides to be a dick by driving right up to an Enclave with a horde just outside

This is my second town. When you complete the literally nothing "final mission," you'll beat the game and be forced onto a new map. You can select which characters you want to carry over. At least, that's what I thought I was doing. So I selected which characters I wanted to save, and immediately tried to start a new game with them.
But you don't select which characters you want to carry over. No, instead, you select which characters don't carry over, but they don't make this obvious. The graphics are counter intuitive in that screen, and I may have been too excited to pay much attention. So I got to the new town screen and saw my 3 worst, unplayed characters from my first town available to carry over. I went through all the psychological stages of grief, but instead of moving on, I finally settled on anger and permanent embitterment from this utter bullshit. This game deletes your fucking save when you beat it, so there was no going back. I didn't even bother getting those guys, I just generated new characters.

You know how you'll pick up a random book, only to find it's terribly written and feels like fanfiction, but you'll continue reading anyways and get really sucked in because of characters that are accidentally fun? That's kind of like my experience with these games. They're bad. They aren't good. They're designed poorly, very poorly in some cases, but they're still fun. It has some value, if not by jank, then by virtue of being a rare kind of game. It has a bunch of weird janky bullshit, which appeals to me.

Anyway, I'll post more stories in this thread over time. I'll say I don't recommend this game, but it's kinda fun in a bad way. Don't give the devs or Microsoft your money. They don't deserve it, and they have clearly failed to learn much from their previous game. Let's bet. I'll wager you a Steam key to a better game, I'll guarantee you that the devs will never manage to make a fun game after this series. Implying this is fun.
There's a lot more to this game I can make massive walls about, but I've run out of steam for now. Next time I play it, I'll try to complain about something and post the result here. Maybe I'll show the mind-bogglingly strange change in the dodge mechanic between games.
 

thesecret1

Arcane
Joined
Jun 30, 2019
Messages
5,675
Screw you guys, I like the review. It's written to be amusing, which it is, and if you want a tl;dr about the games, it's that they're terrrible, broken pieces of shit and you shouldn't play them.
 

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