State of Decay an absolute mess of bugs
ZOMBIE-THEMED games are coming to the end of their tenure as a sure-fire avenue for developers and publishers to run what once equated to a legal money-printing operation.
State of Decay 2 embodies this sentiment, never offering anything beyond the most tired zombie-genre tropes, ultimately feeling like a gaming experience devoid of anything meaningful or fulfilling.
State of Decay 2 kicks off in the menu screens, as you are presented with three pairs of survivors, of which one you must choose, with your decision being based entirely off some meaningless back-story dripping with dull exposition.
Once you’ve chosen your survivors, you are dropped into an open-ended world that is mainly composed of tedious busy work and scavenging, punctuated with the actual missions that are all some variation of ‘fight this big bunch of zombies and then destroy their Plague Heart thing at the center’.
Simulation games are all well and good, so long as they are very upfront about what they are simulating.
For example, if you were to play Farming Simulator, you can be pretty damn sure that it isn’t a game about the fall of Stalingrad.
State of Decay 2 - and many other developer’s, to be fair - don’t really seem to understand this point.
The majority of people play games as a quick distraction from the real world - we don’t really want to be gathering food and medical supplies for our community and we definitely don’t want the majority of the gameplay loop to consist of just that.
Your objectives in State of Decay 2 almost never deviate from this repetitive grind of venturing out and clearing an area of enemies, then scrounging around for supplies to keep settlers happy.
As is generally the case with games that can’t even get their unique selling points right, the actual game itself is an absolute mess of bugs and technical difficulties.
Things that are supposed to be connected to the ground will be floating in the sky, and vice-versa.
The framerate is positively appaling for a game that isn’t any great shakes in the visual department and the physics makes about as much sense as socks in sandals.