So, I've been playing this for a few days and it ain't bad. There are numerous problems though. My biggest being the sheer lack of mods for it. This means that the worst of State of Decay 1 is transported over to 2 and there's nothing that can be done with it...and it comes in the shape "special" zombies. Probably the worst thing I can think of to do with zombie games. So in this we have stupid things like "screamers" which let out ear piercing yelps that stun your character. Or big, fat, hard to kill "juggernauts" that are frankly just stupid. There's other dumb shit like "plague hearts" that you need to destroy too and all the zombies have silly looking glowing eyes as well...why, I don't know. It's like the makers were afraid of just having a world that was full of Romero zombies, where they're slow, but there's lots of them and a single bite or scratch meant certain death.
On the other hand the game looks lovely and is a real step up from State of Decay. The world feels very nicely done and there are some cool touches in there, like when I had to climb a ladder to a roof of a building to escape a load of zeds and on the top of the roof were abandoned tents that some other survivors had been using. There were a couple of deck chairs and some empty bottles of booze, giving the impression that a couple of people spent their last few days getting langered and looking at the apocalypse unfold.
The character models and animations are much nicer than the first game too, but all the characters are generically created and have a very limited number of voices etc. I even had a moment where my character met someone else from a different group and they spoke exactly the same.
There are very serious problems with the gameplay mechanics though. The most striking being an apparent lack of goal other than staying alive for as long as you can. Whereas 'State of Decay' was about getting your group out of Thrumbull valley, 'State of Decay 2' just seems to involve using up every available resource and then moving to a new map to repeat the whole process. And while this may seem appealing at first, especially to folk who like the whole zed apocalypse thing, it's understandable that some people would get bored quickly with that. Especially when you get your group up to a decent standard of living in a good enclave. Of course, I am still only on the first map and playing on the "standard" level. So harder difficulty levels may do things differently. But, one thing I did notice is that the harder levels just make the zombies (including the "special" ones) more numerous and more taxing to kill. So instead of 20 headshots for a fat bastard, it takes 50 or something dumb like that. However this just makes things annoying, rather than difficult.
There are missions of sorts in there, that are available from other survivors, but they all feel like a variation of each other. Things like watch my back while I raid a building, or find my friend, or gimmie some stuff. The thing is, you don't actually need to have any contact at all with other groups and they become more of a hindrance than anything else. You can poach a member for your own group, though if you're friendly enough with them. But that will make the group disband for some reason.
The day/night cycle is weird too. There's about an hour of daylight and an hour of night time. This is far too short to do anything much and you eventually get caught out at night, because you have to go further and further afield to gather resources and the night is VERY dark. So, you just end up just driving home when night falls and arsing about in the camp until morning arrives. I don't know why the devs changed the day/night cycle from the first game, which was balanced fairly well.
Lastly, there are the vehicles. Jesus christ...the vehicles. Possibly the worst cars I have ever seen in a game. They have zero traction and float about the place like the whole world is a sheet of ice. And playing on a PC and using W for forward, as you would, means that every car acts like you just turned on the ignition and floored it. The wheels spin out, the gears sound manic and keeping control is a task all in itself. Plus, the fuel management is atrocious. A full tank won't get you from one compass point to the next and back meaning each vehicle is a petrol guzzler of epic proportions. I can see what the devs were trying to go for, but it's just absurd. Again it comes down to things being annoying rather than difficult.
Anyway, it's not bad for the price I got it at and I am enjoying it to a certain degree. But for how long, I don't know. Thing is, with a few tweaks here and there, something like 'State of Decay' could have been the definitive zombie game.
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. [click for more]
Posting Permissions
Originally Posted by Neil
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks