Chores interfere with the fun
State of Decay 2 For: Xbox One, PC From: Undead Labs
Rating: () ★★★
ZOMBIE games might not be as popular now as they once were, but that hasn’t stopped Undead Labs and Microsoft from releasing a sequel to the undertheradar hit original game from 2013.
Ultimately, your goal is to survive. You do so by fighting off the hordes of zombies, recruiting fellow survivors to your cause, and building (and expanding) settlements of survivors and helping them thrive.
At the start you get to choose a character to play with, although you will soon be switching between various ones in a move that I both liked and disliked in equal measure. survive, but the inventory management aspect of that and ensuring which survivors were carrying which items and loadouts seemed like busywork to me.
Work is a common theme with this game, though. It straddled the fine line between being fun and being a chore. Constantly searching new areas is fun, but having to constantly go and get food and other resources (often travelling long distances) felt like a chore. You can use cars, but they’re costly to use for resources and, you guessed it, then you need to go and find fuel. It never felt like my settlements could get close to being selfsufficient.
The combat in the game is satisfying but not particularly deep. It comes down to either beating the zombies to death with various weapons, or shooting them. Beating them to a pulp is almost always the best option, as firing a gun will more than likely just attract more zombies to you.
Your melee weapons also wear down over time and eventually break and need repair, which requires finding parts, as mentioned before.
The zombies themselves don’t really pose much of a threat overall. There are your basic ones who are easily avoidable and don’t take much to dispose of, and some plagueinfested zombies that glow red and put up a little bit more of a fight, but later you’ll meet some that will require careful slaughtering.
State of Decay 2 is a somewhat lowbudget game, and it sort of