STATE OF DECAY

Rating: 8.5/10

Platforms: X360, Windows
Genre: Survival horror

Zombies! There's no use hiding it, that's what this game is about. You come back from a boat trip (I think) to run into glowy-eyed figures clawing and trying to eat you. From then on, it's finding out what happened and living through this nightmare. Then you've got the DLC -- Breakdown -- which I think is supposed to make this open-world a sandbox. All I know is I've played Breakdown more than I have played the main game. My main character died there; no, I performed a 'mercy-killing'. THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS!
The first thing I felt when I started this game was relief. I was dreading the possibility that it might be a third person shooter. It's third person but it's not shooter. The best way to describe State of Decay's gameplay would be by likening it to GTA. You'll have less shooting here than in GTA because resources, including bullets, are finite. Not to mention firearms make sound and sounds attract zombies. The interactivity is far greater than GTA; you can enter almost every building you come across. There are cars too. I think everything, other than zombies is finite in this game. Even melee weapons break. Just like in the real world, once you ransack a building, it's empty. Other than scavenging, you can also set up a farm or trade with other settlements to procure resources.
You are not guided along the entire learning curve; roughly half the things you have to learn for yourself. The game has an Autosave function which activates whenever you pause it with Esc -- a double edged tool. You have a 6 sq km playable area out of a 12 sq km map apparently. What's the point of a 12 sq km map then? The world is big, and seems even bigger when you're reluctant to stray from home base. Every in-game day last for two hours divided equally into night and day. And night is scary, it makes you feel vulnerable. Your flashlight only illuminates so much and zombies can come from any direction. State of Decay would function well as a transitory game, easing fans of open-world RPG games into the survival horror genre. Truth be told, survival games horrify me, even if horror is not an intended element. Your characters are weak and outnumbered. That's why its survival. It really makes you feel powerless. When you die, you die. There is no Continue or Checkpoint. The playable character changes over to someone else in the community you've made friends with. I lost my marksman like that.
Another great thing about State of Decay is that it is very PC friendly. I don't have to use the arrow keys and Enter; I can just use WASD and Space. I find that Red Hot Chili Pepper's Californication album goes great with this game. You can play it in the background with no performance issues. These small things make a great difference in terms of comfort and appreciation. The visuals in State of Decay use the right amount of bloom and perfect colours to make the environment look post-apocalyptic. Anybody who's seen a Z-apocalypse movie or Walking Dead will be able to appreciate it. I'm sure this has to be somebody's dream game. However, there is no assistance for adjusting the gamma levels to optimise visibility of objects. This is a fairly large drawback and is a pain to adjust.
    Other drawbacks include the inability to trade among community members directly which is ridiculous and at first, annoying. You can't carry resources in vehicles, even if you dump rucksacks onto the back of a pickup (it levitates where you placed it when you drive off). And finally, you can't climb trees. I always look for that in games -- climbing trees. You can't do it in Assassin's Creed (freeclimbing) and you can't do it here. Heck, it looks like I'm going to have to get a tree climbing simulator just to sate this fantasy.

Minimum System Requirements:
Operating System: Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7
Processor: Intel Pentium 4 @ 3.0 GHz or AMD Athlon equivalent
RAM: 1 GB
Hard Disk: 4 GB of free space
Video Card: nVidia GeForce 7600 GS or ATI Radeon X1600 series