State of Decay 2 Review
State of Decay 2 is a game about compromises, so it’s fitting that the game itself requires a few to enjoy.
The rolling hills, winding roadways and haunting towns in State of Decay 2 feel like the realization of the setting developer Undead Labs struggled to capture when the original game launched on last-gen hardware. The sequel isn’t flawless by any stretch of the imagination, but behind bizarre performance problems and charmingly janky animation, there’s a lot to love.
State of Decay 2 is a massive game, especially considering the smaller budget and size Undead Labs. Following the prologue, the game asks you to pick between three different regions; once there, you can quickly settle a small base. As you explore more of the region and bring in more survivors (all of which are playable), you’ll find bigger, better bases worth settling. You can move and upgrade your base at any time. As you do so, you’ll want to establish outposts to secure benefits for your community such as electricity, running water, gasoline and ammunition. Smart players will also befriend factions to establish partnerships and trade alliances. To build a strong, sustainable community, you’ll need to balance group health, morale, factions and infection outbreaks. To clear the first of the game’s three regions and destroy all zombie outbreak hubs, called plague hearts, it took me roughly 20 hours.
Violence in State of Decay 2 is at odds with itself. At times, the game wants you to laugh as you open a car door while flying down the road at 50mph and turn a zombie into meat sauce. Other moments, you wander into a home and find the remains of another group, often tattered and gory, suggesting they went down fighting. This tonal shift can be jarring at times, but without it, the game would either become exhausting or masturbatory. The same juxtaposition is present in combat. Beating back a horde with a blunt pipe feels desperate, but the second a survivor with you drop kicks a zombie or throws one over their shoulder for you to smash their head like a golfball, things feel light. While internally conflicted, violence is, at the very least, always satisfying and systems-driven. Some characters are specialized with bladed weapons while others might be more skilled with baseball bats and pipes. There’s always a trade-off, of course; bladed weapons kill faster, and blunt objects are better at crowd control but also make more noise as they “clunk” against zombie skulls. Firearms have similar systems at play, with silenced weapons having reduced damage and hampered range. Shotguns are particularly satisfying in State of Decay 2, as body shots often rip large chunks out of zombies in a pulpy, gory explosion. I’m not sure if I should laugh as I eviscerate zombie hordes or lament the loss of life around me, and I don’t think Undead Labs knows either.
Every member that joins your survivor community is playable. While I found myself playing favorites early on, swapping to survivors you’ve put on the back burner is necessary, as other members of the community need time to catch up on sleep or recover from an injury. Because each character has different dispositions and skills, combat and general survival fluctuates in difficulty from survivor to survivor. Those well-versed in firearms can make short work of hordes and plague hearts. Members of your community who don’t have much firearms training are more challenging to use, as the reload animation for these survivors is actually prolonged as you watch them struggle to load the next magazine into their pistol. Additionally, gun durability is extended for survivors with firearm skills while those who are still learning will jam them more frequently and need repairs more often. The immersion of watching a player who’s known for his medical skills clumsily load his weapon can be frustrating in the moment, but only adds to the experience.
Each person found in State of Decay 2’s world comes with procedurally generated specializations that make them stand out from the crowd. Ideally, players will keep their community’s strengths and weaknesses in mind as they search out new members. In doing so, you can diversify the skills you can take advantage of and won’t risk redundant traits. It’s important to have members who are skilled with firearms, but having three of them is a waste when you can instead recruit gardeners and carpenters to improve your community in other ways. Of course, these special dispositions become more refined through use, and the traits can be customized as skills like Cardio, Wits, Resourcefulness and Firearms improve. Again, diversity is key to the success of your community. Just remember, all deaths in State of Decay 2 are permanent, so if your one firearm expert dies in the field, your community could lose out on special training perks back at base.
Perhaps one of my favorite things about the game’s procedurally generated characters is how they interact with each other and the world around them. For example, I recruited a character, Oscar, who specialized in hand-to-hand combat to follow one of my community members, Zion, who specialized in stealth. As we approached a house full of zombies to loot, Oscar yelled, “This is ours for the taking!” to which Zion quickly whispered back “Keep your voice down! Are you trying to get us killed?” These little moments are everywhere. One of my community members knew where her drug dealer before the apocalypse stashed his illegal drugs. When I went to pick them up, another member of my community found that problematic, and I had the option to let them work out the disagreement. Without a major throughline narrative, I worried State of Decay 2 would fall flat; instead, I found myself consistently moved by smart character writing, AI interactions, and emergent storytelling.
While initially overwhelming, one of my favorite aspects of State of Decay 2 is how deep the base and community micromanagement can go. So long as you have the required supplies, you can focus your home base’s utilities to go along with your playstyle. Use all outdoor slots for gardens so you don’t have to look for food? Easy. Create and fully upgrade large workshops so that bullets are near infinite? Done. Of course, if you’re anal about base defense and build your base to be a stronghold, room otherwise used for storage, food, and an infirmary will take a hit. The way you choose to manage your community can help or hinder the way you like to play. At any point you can take apart structures within your base and start from scratch. Survival in State of Decay 2 is all about learning from your mistakes, and base management is no different.
Without a conventional story, there are moments where survival can feel aimless, especially later in the game as your base is loaded with the best perks and your supplies are plentiful. The main goal for the game is to destroy plague hearts from the region you inhabit. Once all of them are destroyed, you can move on to one of the other two regions in the world and do it again. Again, State of Decay 2 is all about the journey throughout the three regions, not a sprint towards some sort of end game.
Co-op has been a feature fans have asked for since the original, and its implementation in the sequel is different than some might expect. Rather than building a new community with a friend separate from the singleplayer experience, friends can visit your community (or vice versa). While it can be fatiguing, the easiest is comparison is FromSoftware’s summoning mechanic. Visitors in a co-op session aren’t directly helping their community; rather they’re helping the host’s thrive. Co-op visitors still accrue gear and survivor experience through co-op sessions. These incentives make joining friends feel rewarding, even if you don’t directly reap the benefits of a bigger base or additional community supplies.
When performance takes a hit, and it does frequently, controlling the situation isn’t as simple as having plenty of ammo and supplies. What I first believed to be significant framerate loss on Xbox One X appears to be framepacing issues. This means that State of Decay 2 either doesn’t have proper 30fps v-sync enabled, or it’s not functioning properly. Instead, the game hovers just north of 30fps, and improper framepacing creates the illusion of severe drops. The result is practically the same as dropped frames, though; input lag spikes and the screen stutters as the player ducks and dives out of the way of incoming hordes. Oddly enough, these issues aren’t consistent and easily replicable. Sometimes, jam-packed scenes filled with zombies run without a hitch while other, quieter moments stutter. None of these things ruin State of Decay 2 for me, but seeing such poor optimization on a flagship title for Microsoft is nothing short of disappointing.
State of Decay 2 made me endlessly happy as I sank hours into it in each play session. Still, what sticks with me are the depressing stories my community told each other in quiet moments on the road. I won’t reflect on the time I set fireworks off across the street from a plague heart as a diversion. No, instead, it’ll be Ruiz telling me about how disconnected he felt from his son before society collapsed, and how the last gift his boy gave him was lost as he struggled to survive. I won’t remember the janky animation as my survivor clipped into the truck as I tried to evade a massive zombie horde, but I’ll remember my disappointment when I discovered the still I built for a struggling faction turned them into alcoholics who I could no longer rely on. State of Decay 2 has a number of failings, but the people I played as and those I met in worn-out homes and abandoned factories felt real enough to make me feel like I was just another hopeless survivor. I might see the credits roll eventually, but whenever that happens, it’ll be too soon to say goodbye to my new friends.
