I was a huge fan of the original State of Decay game. I spent dozens of hours going up one on one with so many zombies. I loved how you had to sneak around and gather supplies, stock up your base and make a go at surviving. I was slightly skeptical when I heard that State of Decay 2 was in the works and we were going to have the same awesome good time from the original SoD, with friends, but it is exactly that.
You still have your home base and you work on that base with your people, but friends with characters from their own game can join and help you, and vice versa with their base and one of your characters.
There are so many things you should be warned about, this game is serious and not at all forgiving, you lose a character, they’re gone and your remaining survivors moods are affected. Oh yeah, and your base has a mood, when they’re in a bad mood, they’re more prone to ruining supplies needed for survival, when they’re in a good mood, they can help you gain experience or find things.
As we are learning from all of these zombies shows, movies and video games, often other survivors can be more dangerous than the zombies, and SoD2 stays true to that, other camps can be friendly or foe. Sometimes you get the opportunity to help them, making your chances of being friendly more likely and then you’ve got a trade opportunity to get things you need, but often opportunities are only around for a little while, so make sure you get to those asap.
Gaming with friends is great, but of course, glitchy. It provides “Influence” (kind of currency) to everyone that joins the game and it’s so nice to have help. But like any game where you have a limited capacity to carry items but collecting items is necessary for survival, it can take a while to gather and joining characters are only able to go in a limited radius from the host. So there can be a lot of waiting around if you join a game, but you can always hunt zombies nearby and scavenge while you wait.
The main glitches come in when driving, if one character has to load a new area they stop in the middle of the road and the vehicle behind might run right into it and then maybe both vehicles will then be thrown into what appears to be another dimension as you spiral through the air landing in a remote location with a destroyed vehicle, hypothetically…
That’s just an example of the glitching, but if you’re a gamer, you accept that glitches are an unfortunate reality of games and hopefully they’re not so bad that you can’t enjoy the game despite them. I feel SoD2 is much more fun, and is perhaps at times even enhanced by the glitches. And $40 for SoD 1 & 2 or $30 just for SoD2, makes the glitches a bit easier to handle.
Cross-platform with XBox One and PC, I recommend this game to anyone who likes to try to survive the zombie apocalypse with friends.
TL;DR: Unforgiving zombie survivor, getting by with a little help from your friends.