Post by Greenfire32 on Jun 11, 2013 20:23:34 GMT -5
Grab your gun, grab some ammo, board up the windows, and prepare yourself. Here comes an undead and hastily written review.
I like to think of State of Decay as the first zombie survival game to understand what it's genre is all about. Unfortunately, I feel it falls flat in many different aspects.
The world of SOD portrays the classic zombie dilemma: nobody knows what's going on, but everyone knows the world went to shit. The undead outnumber the living by 10 to 1, the surviving factions are desperate, and the army is...fucking useless.
In order to get by in this new life, you need friends. Friends who can back you up in a fight, friends who can search for supplies, and friends who can help keep the home base safe. By natural order of the game, you'll be making loads of friends...and also some enemies. Though to be honest, in a zombie survival game, you don't make enough enemies. I'd like to think that this is the way it would realistically happen (you'd make more friends then enemies because everyone is thinking "safety in numbers"), but as far as making a more interesting game, it's sort of a let down. I've been playing the game for a couple of days now, and the only "enemies" I've made are the Job (pronounced "J-OH-B" brothers...
In fact, you'll be making so many friends that very soon the majority of your game becomes "OMG THERES A MISSING SURVIVOR, BETTER GO FIND OUT WHO IT IS!" because one of your friends wandered off and got lost somewhere. The game goes from Interesting-Zombie-Survival-Sim to Dammit-Marcus-I'm-Not-A-Babysitter REALLY fast.
-5
Combat is pretty smooth and overall a very well-handled part of the game. The way it works is: 1 on 1, you're fine. 1 on many, you're fucked. This is good. This is the way it should be. This is the way the world ends. Add in the fact that every action you do (not just combat-based ones) have a fatigue amount factored in, and you can find yourself getting swarmed very quickly with not enough go-juice to limp away crying.
Guns are a whole new set of rules. They are easily the most powerful weapons in the game and they are guaranteed to get you killed. Unless you put a silencer on them. Yep. That's all it takes. And even with certain guns that cant be muzzled, who cares? You've got plenty of ammo and somewhere to be.
So with fatigue governing most of your available actions (and ignoring guns and vehicles), the game turns away from "Unstoppable killing machine" a la Dead Rising, and instead turns to "I must outrun the guard without dropping all these wedges of cheese" a la Skyrim. It forces you to be conservative. Do you really need ANOTHER snack food? Or can it wait for a bit? The game forces you to make sacrifices. But...
Fatty!
Over encumbrance isn't really a problem as it only affects how quickly your fatigue drains. So long as you don't sprint or beat the head of cousin Vinny in over and over and over again, you'll be fine. In fact, the penalty for over encumbrance is so forgiving that I often ignore the weight values of items and just fill the inventory with as much shit as I can find.
Also, pretty early on in the game Alan, an insufferable prick, gets all pissy and says cars are dangerous.
Except they totally aren't. Not only can you use them to travel from A to B, but you can use them to safely travel around cities collecting as much stuff as will fit in your undersized backpack (anyone who's gone to school knows those things can hold loads more shit than the game allows). Zombie hords getting you down? Ford F150 will fix that in no time! Too busy ferrying missing survivors back home? Mini Coop bro.
Cars are THE single most OP thing in SOD. Get one, and you'll win. Fast.
-2
Now I'm going to take a step back from the mechanics here and focus on some good ol' fashioned story telling: It's kind of terrible.
Less than 1.21 gigaseconds into the game, you're bashing the heads in of some poor unsuspecting and undead vancation-going family.
Great Scott!
And the only explanation you're given is Ed going all, "he tried to bite me bro!" There is some TINY bit of dialogue explaining that your character (Marcus) and Ed (his friend) have been out of town on a fishing trip while the outbreak occurred.
And then the game promptly forgets IT'S telling a story.
ANY semblance of "Story" is purely speculative and subjective after that. There is no pre-destined event that moves our characters along. No extremely nice exposition to help explain certain behaviors of certain characters (seriously, why is Alan such a dick?) It's almost as if the developers wanted a "drop you into the heat of the fray and explain it slowly over time" and effectively forgot about the "explain it slowly over time" thing. Yes, the journal has tons of info in it, but this is a game. If I have to go into the index and look up a character to find out if he's alive or not, the story is not being told, it's being thrown in the trash. The only time any bit of the story gets told is when someone cares enough to reach into the dumpster and take out the perfectly fine stereo that someone just THREW AWAY.
I've played the game almost everyday since it's release and I have yet to experience "the part where you get to kill Alan" or "the part when the Pastor gets sick." In fact, on my save file Alan is still a gargantuan cock, but at least he's putting up with everybody and Pastor William is healthier than everyone else combined.
-10
Pictured Above: Alan
But out of all my gripes, the biggest would be the lack of multiplayer. State of Decay (previously known as Class 3) was supposed to be a test of a promise. C3 was being made purely and expresively for the purpose of testing how well the developers could handle multiplayer so that when Class 4 is being developed, it can be made into a long-term MMO. The fact that multiplayer was cut from C3 means the overall goal and concept of the game failed. After almost 3 or 4 years of development, the test failed.
(-20, but since it's unfair to judge a game based on it's hype I wont subtract it from the overall score)
Well that State decayed Quickly
After all it's faults, SOD is still a solid game worth playing. Once you get passed all the negative and accept it for what it is (an arcade game), it begins to grow on you. After about 3-5 hours of straight gameplay, it begins to get easier to forgive it's shortcomings. You'll still notice the hilariously short and re-used amount of spoken dialogue as well as the personality sharing between characters, you'll still use vehicles when possible, and you'll still bring a gun with you all the time. But you will also begin to accept that this is the State of our Decay and now you need to make the best of it.
On a Scale of 1 to 32, I give State of Decay a solid 15. It's Average at best, but it's still an addictive and fun game once you get over your own nit-picks and gripes.
If you haven't guessed it yet, I was mostly burned by the Hype-fail.
15 of 32
-Average-
I like to think of State of Decay as the first zombie survival game to understand what it's genre is all about. Unfortunately, I feel it falls flat in many different aspects.
The world of SOD portrays the classic zombie dilemma: nobody knows what's going on, but everyone knows the world went to shit. The undead outnumber the living by 10 to 1, the surviving factions are desperate, and the army is...fucking useless.
In order to get by in this new life, you need friends. Friends who can back you up in a fight, friends who can search for supplies, and friends who can help keep the home base safe. By natural order of the game, you'll be making loads of friends...and also some enemies. Though to be honest, in a zombie survival game, you don't make enough enemies. I'd like to think that this is the way it would realistically happen (you'd make more friends then enemies because everyone is thinking "safety in numbers"), but as far as making a more interesting game, it's sort of a let down. I've been playing the game for a couple of days now, and the only "enemies" I've made are the Job (pronounced "J-OH-B" brothers...
In fact, you'll be making so many friends that very soon the majority of your game becomes "OMG THERES A MISSING SURVIVOR, BETTER GO FIND OUT WHO IT IS!" because one of your friends wandered off and got lost somewhere. The game goes from Interesting-Zombie-Survival-Sim to Dammit-Marcus-I'm-Not-A-Babysitter REALLY fast.
-5
Combat is pretty smooth and overall a very well-handled part of the game. The way it works is: 1 on 1, you're fine. 1 on many, you're fucked. This is good. This is the way it should be. This is the way the world ends. Add in the fact that every action you do (not just combat-based ones) have a fatigue amount factored in, and you can find yourself getting swarmed very quickly with not enough go-juice to limp away crying.
Guns are a whole new set of rules. They are easily the most powerful weapons in the game and they are guaranteed to get you killed. Unless you put a silencer on them. Yep. That's all it takes. And even with certain guns that cant be muzzled, who cares? You've got plenty of ammo and somewhere to be.
So with fatigue governing most of your available actions (and ignoring guns and vehicles), the game turns away from "Unstoppable killing machine" a la Dead Rising, and instead turns to "I must outrun the guard without dropping all these wedges of cheese" a la Skyrim. It forces you to be conservative. Do you really need ANOTHER snack food? Or can it wait for a bit? The game forces you to make sacrifices. But...
Fatty!
Over encumbrance isn't really a problem as it only affects how quickly your fatigue drains. So long as you don't sprint or beat the head of cousin Vinny in over and over and over again, you'll be fine. In fact, the penalty for over encumbrance is so forgiving that I often ignore the weight values of items and just fill the inventory with as much shit as I can find.
Also, pretty early on in the game Alan, an insufferable prick, gets all pissy and says cars are dangerous.
Except they totally aren't. Not only can you use them to travel from A to B, but you can use them to safely travel around cities collecting as much stuff as will fit in your undersized backpack (anyone who's gone to school knows those things can hold loads more shit than the game allows). Zombie hords getting you down? Ford F150 will fix that in no time! Too busy ferrying missing survivors back home? Mini Coop bro.
Cars are THE single most OP thing in SOD. Get one, and you'll win. Fast.
-2
Now I'm going to take a step back from the mechanics here and focus on some good ol' fashioned story telling: It's kind of terrible.
Less than 1.21 gigaseconds into the game, you're bashing the heads in of some poor unsuspecting and undead vancation-going family.
Great Scott!
And the only explanation you're given is Ed going all, "he tried to bite me bro!" There is some TINY bit of dialogue explaining that your character (Marcus) and Ed (his friend) have been out of town on a fishing trip while the outbreak occurred.
And then the game promptly forgets IT'S telling a story.
ANY semblance of "Story" is purely speculative and subjective after that. There is no pre-destined event that moves our characters along. No extremely nice exposition to help explain certain behaviors of certain characters (seriously, why is Alan such a dick?) It's almost as if the developers wanted a "drop you into the heat of the fray and explain it slowly over time" and effectively forgot about the "explain it slowly over time" thing. Yes, the journal has tons of info in it, but this is a game. If I have to go into the index and look up a character to find out if he's alive or not, the story is not being told, it's being thrown in the trash. The only time any bit of the story gets told is when someone cares enough to reach into the dumpster and take out the perfectly fine stereo that someone just THREW AWAY.
I've played the game almost everyday since it's release and I have yet to experience "the part where you get to kill Alan" or "the part when the Pastor gets sick." In fact, on my save file Alan is still a gargantuan cock, but at least he's putting up with everybody and Pastor William is healthier than everyone else combined.
-10
Pictured Above: Alan
But out of all my gripes, the biggest would be the lack of multiplayer. State of Decay (previously known as Class 3) was supposed to be a test of a promise. C3 was being made purely and expresively for the purpose of testing how well the developers could handle multiplayer so that when Class 4 is being developed, it can be made into a long-term MMO. The fact that multiplayer was cut from C3 means the overall goal and concept of the game failed. After almost 3 or 4 years of development, the test failed.
(-20, but since it's unfair to judge a game based on it's hype I wont subtract it from the overall score)
Well that State decayed Quickly
After all it's faults, SOD is still a solid game worth playing. Once you get passed all the negative and accept it for what it is (an arcade game), it begins to grow on you. After about 3-5 hours of straight gameplay, it begins to get easier to forgive it's shortcomings. You'll still notice the hilariously short and re-used amount of spoken dialogue as well as the personality sharing between characters, you'll still use vehicles when possible, and you'll still bring a gun with you all the time. But you will also begin to accept that this is the State of our Decay and now you need to make the best of it.
On a Scale of 1 to 32, I give State of Decay a solid 15. It's Average at best, but it's still an addictive and fun game once you get over your own nit-picks and gripes.
If you haven't guessed it yet, I was mostly burned by the Hype-fail.
15 of 32
-Average-