11.October.2014

State of Decay was released in June 2013 to Xbox 360 users, and honestly it took survival games to a new level. As well as being released on PC in November 2013 to PC users, the game also got additional DLC for a relatively low price, considering it started as a console game. For the time being, this game remains one of the best zombie survival games to be on the current market and it is always worth a play if you just want to kill evil chunks of walking flesh. There is also going to be a version of the game, State of Decay: Year-One Survival Edition, scheduled for release in early 2015 for Xbox One users.

State of Decay started life as a basic, story mode survival game. The whole plot of the story from the original game was to keep as many survivors as possible alive whilst trying to escape from the zombie-infested towns you were trapped in pre-apocalypse. With the first DLC released for the game, it added additional survival levels whilst removing the story to make it a game purely for survival. You could advance to a new survival level once you found an RV and drove away with a new set of supplies ‘to a new town’. Though Breakdown used the same map as the original game, it added more difficulty. Hordes became more common and thicker, with more of the special zombie species scattered throughout the town you had to do your supply runs in. The second DLC pack, Lifeline, gave you a new set of characters with a new storyline to follow and a new reason to live. It changed the point of view to one of a soldier in the centre of a pandemic-filled city, trying to find the cure for the Zombieism.

Instead of just a normal range of zombies, State of Decay adds multiple types of zombie threats to the game, making it seem like a single player survival version of Left for Dead without the evil witches. Whilst the normal zombies just became irritating and in the way once you’ve been playing the game for a while, the special zombies kept up the interesting part of the fights alive. Though the SWAT zombies and the ARMY zombies are essentially the normal zombies in body armour, the rest of the special zombies make every hunt different, though I often hunted with the bumper of whatever car I was trashing at that point. Whilst the Screamers would attract the hordes with their crippling screams, the Bloaters explode upon the lightest amount of damage, omitting a poisonous gas that can kill or severely injure your character. The Ferals hunt like wild animals, lunging fast at whichever survivor is the closest. The Juggernauts the most damage to kill, with your bullets barely denting their skulls. He can pick you up and pull you apart with just his hands, and he is practically impossible to kill with a car without killing the survivor as well.

The best part of this zombie-killing game is that, no matter what version you are playing, the point of the game is always the same. Keep you and your group of survivors alive. Scavenge, hunt and kill. Whilst the original game’s and Breakdown’s plot mainly focus on the survival of the original survivors, Lifeline’s plot gives the player a whole new focus. Lifeline focuses purely on the abandoned soldiers left in the centre of the city, searching for the cure for the Zombieism that is killing everyone who hasn’t been made into food. The only hopes they have are of finding the lab notes of the recently-deceased scientist who may have found the cure.


Permadeath is something I have rarely seen featured in games, and it is one of the many reasons that I fell in love with State of Decay when I first played it. It instantly adds more focus and interest to the game whilst making it harder. Once your character is dead, they are gone. If you’ve killed off every single survivor you had, your game is over. The only way to get your survivors back is to restart the game, which means levelling every character’s skills again. Since the survivors get attacked by hordes, with or without you to guide them, it adds to how much attention you need to pay. A survivor can die doing a trade run, and if you weren’t focusing you are the reason they died. It keeps you on guard constantly, but it keeps you playing for hours. The best feature of the games comes with Breakdown, though. In Breakdown, you get an opportunity to invite veteran characters from the first game as ‘heroes’ for reaching an achievement. Once you’ve reached the achievement, for example for the first character who dies you get Jacob as a ‘hero’ to play as, you get to keep that ‘hero’ for as long as you’re playing that level of Breakdown. The game gives you the potential to get every one of the original 34 survivors to play as, if you can unlock them all. For every new level, you get a new variety of hero to unlock and by the time to level 6 you can unlock the best of the heroes. This game can keep you playing for hours, as if you are in a real survivor situation, and I cannot wait to see the competition for this game that will come from the other consoles.
Scavenge. Hunt. Kill. Survive.