Remember a few years about when everything was about vampires. We had Twilight, True Blood, and The Vampire Diaries dominating the entertainment industry. Strangely this vampire fanaticism never really made it into the video games industry, probably because games had already burnt out on vampires around the Blade era with Bloodrayne and the Vampire: The Masquerade series. Now it turns out that vampires, unlike diamonds, were not forever as zombies are the new top dog. Not just any zombies though, gritty drama-causing zombies have spread out from The Walking Dead and infected all aspects of zombie entertainment.

Don’t believe me? Check out the latest Dead Rising 3 footage, gritty as the roads after heavy snow. While you’re at it have a look at the Box Office at the moment, see anything gritty and zombie related? Of course you do, it’s World War Z. Now jump onto the Xbox Live Arcade and check out State of Decay, the third-person, open-world zombie survival game from Undead Labs.

On the surface at least, State of Decay looks like the zombie game to end all zombie games. After a brief tutorial section, the game dumps you in about 30 square miles of Middle America and gives you one simple task; survive. To do this you’ll have to maintain your home base, acquire supplies and keep the local zombie population in check.

The base management is pretty straightforward, with each potential home base having a set number of spaces for you to build new stuff in, as well as some built in rooms which can’t be altered, such as a car repair workshop in the truck depot. The extra buildings you can construct range from bunkhouses which give your survivors a place to sleep, to gardens for growing food and infirmaries for managing injuries. New buildings require construction resources to build, which segues us nicely to the resource collecting.

In State of Decay, there are 5 resources that your base needs to survive: food, medicine, ammo, fuel and construction materials. Food is pretty self-explanatory; you and your survivor buddies munch through a certain amount of Twinkies and tinned apricots a day, depending on how many people live with you, whether any of them are the embodiment of gluttony etc. Medicine stops people from dying of dysentery and you know that whole zombie virus thing that’s knocking about. Ammo makes the guns work…I’ll wait a second while you write that one down?

Fuel is used to make firebombs and not to power things like generators or cars for some weird reason making it the least important resource by far, whilst the aforementioned constructions materials are used to build, repair and upgrade stuff in the base. It’s a simple system that balances the survivalist feeling of collecting resources with also needing to give the player time to do the missions, explore the environment, kill the locals etc.

In addition to the resources, you also have to manage the people within your community by making sure they don’t get depressed or fall out with each other. It’s a nice idea in theory but in practice it just means you have to trek back to home base and take someone on a zombie hunting mission to cheer them up. Feeling down? Kill some zombies. Annoyed at another survivor? Kill some zombies. Can’t sleep? Kill some zombies.

You can also add new members to your community by finding struggling survivors out in the world and convincing them to join you, usually by doing something nice for them. Once they join your team you are free to swap characters and play as any of the playable survivors within your camp (you can’t play as the radio chick). So the more people in the camp, the more people you have to fall back on if your character gets tired…or dead. That’s right folks, State of Decay brings perma-death to the table so I hope you weren’t planning on getting attached to your characters. You could be casually strolling down the road with your buddy Steve and then BOOM! Steve is dead…no more Steve. This really adds to the intensity of the game, as even the slightest mistake can lead to the death of a character.

Speaking of the mob, we should probably talk about the zombies themselves. State of Decay uses the more modern day ‘rage’ model of zombies made popular by movies such as 28 Days Later. In addition to that, it plays homage to (i.e. rips off) Left 4 Dead’s special infected model. State of Decay brings in the Feral Zombie…who is just the hunter, the Armoured Zombie…who is just the S.W.A.T zombie, the Big ‘Un…who is just the Tank reskinned as a Boomer, the Bloated zombie…who is the love child of the Boomer and the Spitter (I bet there’s fan fiction of that somewhere on the internet) and finally the Screamer who at first glance seems pretty original. The Screamer has no arms and screams, which both incapacitates nearby survivors and attracts nearby zombies, making him a royal pain in the arse. But wait, that sounds familiar… Well if you’re going to rip someone off, it might as well be Valve I suppose.

The general, run of the mill infected are pretty much spot on. On their own they are no threat, but awaken a group of them and you better be packing some serious heat or you’re in trouble. We veer away from Left 4 Dead here as each individual zombie can take quite a beating if you don’t shoot them in the head, as it should be.
If you find time between smashing brains in, scavenging food, building your base and singing Always Look on the Bright Side of Life to the other survivors, you can partake in the story missions, which ultimately lead to your group attempting to escape the quarantined valley they reside in. These missions are well structured and as varied as can be expected in this type of game. Go somewhere and find something we need, go investigate this place, go kill this bad guy; it’s standard fare but it’s all well executed.

The missions themselves follow a linear plot which is at odds with the rest of the games free roaming, open-ended world. You decide who can join your camp, what buildings you add, if you kick a troublemaker out of the base and so on, but the missions are a set path for you to follow. This approach works the first time you play State of Decay, but it does hurt the replay value somewhat. Thankfully an upcoming patch will be adding in a sandbox mode which will remove this fixed section of the game, giving a more unique experience every time you play.

The soundtrack is suitably depressing and really hits home the feeling of desperation and survival that the game is trying so hard to convey. When the zombies start rolling in the music picks up the pace in a very Left 4 Dead sort of way. On the sound effect front things are pretty top notch too. The guns all make a satisfying and realistic bang, running down zombies in a car makes a fantastically morbid squelching sound and bonking a zombie over the head with a frying pan had that classic clanking sound down to a tee.

The voice acting continues this trend of excellence as well, with some really varied and well thought out characters and dialogue rounding out the roster. The taunts are particularly amusing to listen to, though entirely pointless as a game mechanic. Don’t shout at the zombie, shoot it you nonce. However the games indie heritage comes to bite them in the arse here, as whilst the dialogue is well written and well delivered, it does get very repetitive. Even the funniest one liner in the world loses its appeal after you’ve heard it a half dozen times. This is especially noticeable with certain pieces of dialogue, such as the lines your character spouts when they return to home base…which you’ll be doing a lot.

Graphically, State of Decay isn’t taking home any medals. It’s not ugly per say, but when you try to make a massive free-roaming title and fit it into an XBLA-sized download, you’re not going to be packing it full of high resolution textures. I’d say it’s on a par with Dead Rising on the graphical front, only with all those vibrant Las Vegas colours replaced with gritty browns and greys because colour is always the first victim of the apocalypse. If State of Decay were rocking all singing all dancing graphics then that might excuse them for this next point, the frame rate issues.

Bless its little cotton socks, it does try but State of Decay suffers from some of the worst frame rate issues I’ve ever experienced in a game. Stay on foot and you’ll never really notice it unless you awaken every horde in the city at once, but hop into a car and you’re in for a world of suck. You see cars move fast…too fast for the game to keep up with loading textures, models etc. so the second you clamber into a vehicle you’re asking for trouble. I can’t count the amount of times I was driving along and suddenly the game freezes for a split second, and then unfreezes and I’m parked in a hedge. It wouldn’t be so bad, but the things that cause the frame rate to drop i.e. zombies, car wrecks in the road are the exact things that I need to frame rate to behave itself around so I don’t end up deader than tank tops.

The cars themselves are also another annoyance. For one thing they handle like arse on a stick…that is to say not very well. The game’s physics engine also has a very funny idea of what constitutes a small jump and what is a rocket jump pad that will send your car hurtling off into space. Vehicles are also made of butter, so you better invest in a repair garage at your base if you don’t want to have every vehicle within 50 miles as a smoking wreck before lunch.

Whilst I’m pointing out all the minor gripes, the camera angle can and will betray you when you enter some buildings, leaving you guessing as to what manner of monster is busy eating your face. But like I said these are minor gripes now, my only real problem with State of Decay is its massive frame rate issues, which are apparently being ironed out for the PC version which will be launching at a later date. Get rid of those issues and State of Decay really is the ultimate zombie survival game, but as it stands they are such a noticeable problem that they prevent the game from reaching the score it really deserves. I advise and discerning zombie fan pick up this title, as the issues it has are vastly overshadowed by the things it does right.