Posted by Kromey at 7:18pm Jun 7 '13This game is awesome!
It's a zombie apocalypse survivor sim, but it's similarities to other zombie titles pretty much end right there: You're not some bad-ass zombie-slaying demigod, but rather you play a community of generally frightened survivors just trying to stay alive while the undead (often literally) are howling at the gates.
Gameplay focuses on keeping your fellow survivors happy and healthy, building up your home base and establishing outposts, and scavenging for the resources to do all of that. It's an open-world sandbox game, although unlike other sandbox games the entire world is at all times part of the simulation, so while you're ransacking buildings in one town hordes are wandering through another, potentially right up to the gates of your home base or attacking survivors you haven't even found yet!
And permadeath! While you can switch between other survivors you've found and befriended at pretty much any time (unless they're hurt or tired), if a survivor dies that's it, he or she is done and gone from your game forever. It's not game over, though, not while you still have other survivors in your community.
One feature I have really mixed feelings about is the fact that even when you're offline, the game "continues" (in reality it calculates everything that happened in the time you were offline when you next start it up). This means that if you have to walk away while things are dire, it only gets worse when you come back; on the other hand, if you've got ample supplies and morale is high enough, you can come back to find all your wounded and exhausted comrades fully healed up and well-rested, ready to take on the apocalypse again!
Overall I'm loving this game so far. And for a mere 1600 MS points (~$20), it's a steal! Only available on XBLA, although there's a PC version coming as well (no release date set for that yet).
State of Decay - Kromey