By Dan Stapleton
State of Decay 2’s
open-world battle for survival against a zombie menace is the right
kind of post-apocalyptic fun. It creates plenty of high-stakes moments,
punctuated by the relative calm of foraging for supplies while always
looking over your shoulder. It’s a potent mixture for a while, until the
combination of repetitive missions and annoying bugs eventually dulls
the joy of squashing heads, even when your co-op entourage rolls deep.
Just like in
2013’s original State of Decay,
in State of Decay 2 you can freely switch between randomly generated
survivors in your post-apocalyptic community – and you’ll regularly have
to, because they can only be pushed so far before their stamina starts
to give out. Or worse, you did something stupid and got someone
permanently killed, taking their unique traits and whatever leveled-up
skills they’ve acquired with them. You’re not able to customize their
names or looks at all, which is a shame, because if XCOM has taught us
anything it’s that it’s fun to tell your friends and co-workers how you
got them killed. But that fear of loss (you can’t reload from an earlier
save!) adds some significant weight to the struggle that plays out on
one of three open-world rural maps, as you scavenge the region to build a
shelter and work to cleanse the land of a disease known as the Blood
Plague.
Unlike the original, though, State of Decay 2 can be played
in its entirety (after the tutorial) in four-player co-op, which even
works cross-platform between PC and Xbox One. The joining parties enter
the host’s game and get to bring back all their looted spoils (aside
from resources) plus bonus rewards to their own game. It’s a
near-universal truth that games like this become more fun when played
with friends, and that holds very true in State of Decay 2.
“
You can hardly swing a dead cat without hitting a zombie.
There’s not much more to the generic post-zombie-apocalypse story than
the quest to wipe out the Blood Plague – at least not that I’ve
encountered in a single playthrough on one of the three maps, the
Plateau – but there’s some background radio chatter that suggests a
bigger world of survivors and organizations out there that could someday
make an appearance. Everything else is told on a smaller, more personal
scale: individual characters will have their own quest lines assigned
to them, such as one woman who wanted to track down what happened to a
police officer friend of hers in a series of missions, and when you
eventually appoint a leader to your group, their randomly determined
class appears to influence how your story ends. (Mine was a Warlord, as
opposed to Sheriff, Trader, and Builder, which as you can imagine ended
with lots of shooting.) But generally it’s a sandbox-style RPG where
you’re tackling dynamically appearing quests as people call for help,
and you make your own story in the way you deal with them.
While zombies are so omnipresent in the open world that you can hardly
swing a dead cat without hitting one, they’re spread thin: next to
something like
Dead Rising 4 or what we’ve seen in those
Days Gone trailers,
the number of “zeds” you encounter in the open world at any one time is
positively quaint. It’s rare to see more than a dozen at once, and the
so-called “hordes” that appear on the map are limited to five or six.
It’s enough to keep you on your toes, but individual zombies are more a
nuisance than a threat.
Read More:
http://www.ign.com/articles/2018/05/17/state-of-decay-2-review
Related Article:
https://gotypicks.blogspot.com/2017/09/2017-game-of-year.html
