You start as Marcus who along with a friend comes back from a weekend of hiking in the woods only to find out the the world has gone to hell. Everywhere they dead corpses eating on living people who then turn into corpses as well. Marcus quickly finds shelter at a survivor group that lives in an old church.
In State of Decay it's all about surviving. You'll need to scavenge in town to look for food, weapons, ammo, medicine etc. I have to admit that that seemed cool in the beginning, and I even had a lot of fun with it a for a period of time, but after a while this feature starts to get old and boring.
Another important feature about State of Decay is expanding your survivor group with more helpful people. You'll find these people all over the map. Usually they are part of a struggling group themselves and would love to join you. It's up to you whether you allow 'em to or not. Again, this sounded very cool in the beginning but I didn't really care about as you'll never get a bond with any of the survivors. They are ''just'' virtual dudes surviving in an virtual world. There is nothing human about them. That's mainly due to the very, very limited dialog in the game. Throughout the whole game I felt like the survivors where some kind of mutes. And IF there finally is any dialogue it's usually a stupid joke about shooting a pony through the head (This joke literally gets repeated hundreds of times!).
You also have to make sure you're group is motivated and happy. As soon as there are too many infestations (large groups of zombies) or not enough food the moral of your group will go down. They'll be scared or just ''down''. One way to help them is to go out with them and shoot some zombies. After a while this gets such a pain in the ass. Every 5 minutes another member will be desperate and would want your help. And it's not because I'm such a bad gamer that there were infestations everywhere and that people where turning into cannibalism due to the lack of food. No! I had food like I was running a soup kitchen and supplies like I was running a hardware store. After a while I just thought; just kill yourself and get it over with so I can continue doing my own business.
The reason that I wrote this review is because of this. I arrived at the final mission (Yes, there are missions in this game although most are continually the same) with my favorite black zombie killing motherfucker ''MARCUS''. My guy Marcus accidentally dies during the mission (Yes, your characters can die but I'll get to that later) so it's mission failed. You get reset to your compound as another member of your group but some kind of glitch kept me from playing it again. I played hours and hours but the mission just never got offered again. I'm pretty certain this is some kind of glitch or otherwise I'm the biggest douchebag in the world. Long story short: I can't fucking finish the game!
This game obviously isn't all shit. As I already said your characters can die and this is a great add. It adds to the realism and it will make you think twice before going into some old building filled with walkers while just carrying a simple stick. The only problem is again: If a character dies you don't actually give a rats ass because you never bonded with the dude or chick.
The game does feature a nice soundtrack and stumbling upon other survivors is pretty cool. The fact that there are a limited amount of cars on the map adds to the realism as well.
