Akroview

Get mission, walk, kill zombie, realise you can’t carry more supplies and repeat. This is the general principle behind State of Decay it seems. Now don’t get me wrong we here at Akroview love zombies and the undead, sure our editor (ME!) is part of a zombie hunting group in Ireland, but I wasn’t all that impressed with State of Decay as most others seem to be.

Now we did take into account that this is not a retail release but actually an arcade download and saying that it is actually pretty damn big! (Please refrain from a “That’s what she said” joke, were mature here, right?!) The map is huge but it is mostly barren wasteland and some fields, with 3 main towns scattered throughout.

One thing I really did enjoy about SoD was the graphics, for an arcade release they look pretty awesome, and the detail on the zombies is really well done, but we’ll touch on the zombies in a bit.

Gameplay is simple but can get repetitive but at its core it is a true survival game, you have a stamina and a vitality bar to keep your eye on and these two bars can really be the difference in whether or not you’re a hero or zombie chow. I enjoy the survival and scavenging parts of the single player and there were times when you yourself feel a sense of desperation when searching for much needed medical supplies, then get hit with disappointment when you find out there was only a girls doll in the medical cabinet!

The enemies that you face are a mixed batch of infected but they lack in originality, it seems that every zombie game needs a big fat zombie, a screaming zombie, a zombie that emits poisonous gas and a member of the army who got infected. The concepts may be lacking in originality but the design of the zombies certainly isn’t, they actually look rather disturbing a grotesque.

So far I have encountered 3 types of special infected, if there are more I am yet to run into them. The ones I have encountered are; a large bloated zombie, an armoured zombie and a screamer. The bloated zombie is awesome and I feel like it is the most challenging to kill and genuinely terrifies me when I see it charging me. The screamer zombies are difficult to kill but for a lot more annoying reason, rather than challenging!

Your main objective is to survive and keep your base stocked with food and medical supplies along with building materials, bullets and various other survival tools. You get a sense of home and safety which gives you the urge to go out and find more supplies. You also have to help calm down some survivors in the base as this can lower morale and lessen your chances of getting survivors or helpers to give you a hand carrying supplies back.

Overall it is quite a fun game but can get repetitive at times, you can also feel a little bit overwhelmed with the amount of tasks you need to get done all whilst trying to survive the oncoming horde. You get to meet interesting characters and locations and it does feel pretty damn realistic. So well done Undead Labs on creating a very believable survival game, and all this for the low price of 12€ how can you refuse.

AW!