State of Decay 2 Review:
A Toybox of Zombies

Let me start off by stating my bias: I am a diehard fan of the first State of Decay. It was one of the first games I had a chance to review with a press copy as I really dove into gaming as an adult; I skipped Day Z, I skipped most zombie games for years, just incredibly content with my experience in Trumbull County. It will always be just a little bit special in my eyes, easy to look back at with rose tinted glasses in many ways.

That isn’t to say it was a perfect game. I absolutely admit that the first game was full of rough edges; there were issues abound as you tried to stuff supplies into cars, lagged, and then got swarmed by the undead. The developers constantly tried to update and polish even after the game was fully released, learning and improving as they went, working towards building something even bigger. In that regard, State of Decay 2 is a better game than its predecessor, giving players a cornucopia of fun activities and ways to play in its sandboxes. Yet, there’s that little part of me that still wishes for Trumbull County, wishes for something that the sequel almost manages to pull off, but never quite gets there.

I resisted writing this review for a long time, simply because I didn’t quite know how to collect my thoughts cohesively. But, as Halloween is almost upon us, Undead Labs has released its final major patch after four years of free added content. After enjoying the game off and on since 2020, I fully believe State of Decay 2 is worth your money if you like zombie games, but does it have that something special to make it really stand out in a crowded field? Is it the right game for you?

A quick time-sensitive note: While this game and all its upgrades are already a steal at just $30, until November 4th, 2024, you can get State of Decay 2: Juggernaut Edition for only $7.50 during the Steam Scream Sale! If you have any interest at all, I highly recommend grabbing it at this price while you can.

What is State of Decay 2?

State of Decay 2 was released in 2018 as a sequel to the 2013 State of Decay, and how we got it as a game was an interesting ride all its own. The original game was something of a sleeper hit, created by then small studio Undead Labs. It told the story of Trumbull Valley, a vaguely western-US rural set of towns that suddenly had to deal with the start of a zombie outbreak. You started as two friends who just came back from a backpacking trip to chaos, and slowly built up a story of army breakdown, disaster, and people cobbling together survival from the ashes. It was messy, it was glitchy, it was glorious.

The first game, in some ways, was a sort of proof of concept. It merged an open-world aesthetic that you could find in a Grand Theft Auto and threw it into a survival-horror-action blender. There was a bit of simulation. People loved the idea, but as the game’s story campaign came to an end, most craved more. They wanted more freedom, more maps, and most importantly… multiplayer. While Undead Labs added more game modes and a secondary campaign, they said playing with friends was always a goal that would take more time.

That’s what State of Decay 2 is. It’s bigger, has better moment-to-moment gameplay, and just more options than the original. It’s a continuation… maybe not of the story, but of the world its prequel created. The zombie problem is more than just the valley. Survivors have to band together, and fortunately, you can now play with up to four friends. For those of you who enjoy zombie games, the tone and mood of this game is very much a B-movie. It's got base-buiding without forcing you to constantly craft or count wooden planks, and it has action without being a non-stop grind fest. It's a great middle point between a full action experience like Left 4 Dead and the incredibly intense, detail oriented style of Project Zomboid. I personally think its a great way to ease your way into survival games.

Fighting, Hiding, Building - The Core Gameplay Loop

You start off a game of State of Decay 2 getting out of a car that just ran out of gas with two other survivors, where one of them comments on how this location looks better off than other places visited. Maybe they can make something that lasts, an actual community. The game nudges you to find a nearby location that can be turned into a home base, and with that, you are dropped into the thick of it.

State of Decay as a series blends a 3rd person survival game with action RPG elements, then coats it all in a light sprinkle of city building genre. This isn’t a game where you are building something up wall-by-wall, but instead just have to make sure you can find the resources you need - construction materials, first aid supplies, etc - to construct first aid tents or crafting workshops inside your little fortress.

Finding resources is done through collecting giant rucksacks while scavenging the nearby houses. In many zombie games, finding a good gun is the big highlight, but here you get a big smile on your face when you ransack a gas station and find a rucksack of fuel to power electrical generators by home. This immediately sets up a fun hard-to-argue-with gameplay loop: you want to build a new upgrade to your community. You go on a harrowing adventure sneaking around looking for the supplies needed, end up sneaking past hordes of zombies or fighting your way to your destination, then rinse and repeat.

I really enjoy how the games lean into the idea of building a community. You don’t have a food bar, but instead your stamina meter will lose its maximum capacity as a character becomes tired. Your best melee fighter with a replica katana might take a savage bite from a special zombie, and their max health gets halved. You can use expensive med-kits to fix some of this, but the best way is to make sure you have an infirmary and enough beds, swapping over to another character in your community - this one might have a really nice bolt-action rifle and has stats to run and sneak - and playing as them for a while.

While I’m letting myself gush about the series, State of Decay is at its best as the intensity creeps up on you. You got a little gutsy, and now find yourself a block or two away from your getaway car, a few zombie hordes between you and it. Night is falling, and the slow discordant twangs of guitar from the wonderfully moody Jesper Kyd soundtrack gives you a sense of unease. You are weighed down by all the loot you already have, and already have a few bites taken out of you. You have to get home, but do you drop some gear and hoof it through nearby wilderness, or try and sneak back over to rescue your car?

What State Of Decay 2 Adds

State of Decay 2 takes the formula of the first game and builds on it, asking the question ‘who gets to lead after the end of the world’? It’s an unspecified set of weeks or months after the initial outbreak, so scattered groups of survivors move in and out of the map, more infrastructure lies broken and shattered across the places you visit. Instead of trying to complete one dedicated story campaign, you are just trying to get a community up and running long enough until one member is declared a leader and finishes a final glorious project that proves your community might actually survive the slow breakdown of everything around you.

Here, the sequel attempts to add replayability. Choosing your leader from the survivors you start with or convince to join you shapes how the rest of the story plays out. Choosing a ‘Builder’ leader can give you access to cozy living spaces and a strong sniper tower so community members keep a wider area around your base free of zombies, while a ‘Warlord’ leader gives you more efficient access to building your own ammo and training for combat. There’s also not just one map, but five different maps with their own atmosphere and challenges.

One of the slow creeping horrors from the original game was watching as supplies got harder to find; finishing searching a location on your map grays it out so you knew it was stripped clean. Playing long enough meant the sites around your base were stripped bare, forcing you further afield to get items even as more zombies inevitably appeared. In State of Decay 2 this can still happen, but you have a much more pressing threat in the horrific plague hearts which are found on the map.

These things are awful. Writhing masses of ribcages and skulls that thrum with a horrible light. The whole area around one gets a thickening red mist around it, and plague zombies with crimson skin shamble about, louder and more aggressive. Taking out a plague heart will clear out the plague zombies in the nearby vicinity, and in general make the map safer. If a plague heart ‘wakes up’ from being dormant, that area of the map gets more violent, making roaming hordes worse and making the map less safe.

So there you have two competing factors - the map slowly having more infestations that can creep across the map as more and more hordes appear over time, and the plague hearts which make many parts of the map scarier right out of the gate. Remember: regular zombies just hurt you. Plague zombies can actually infect your survivors so they need created antidotes before they turn. It’s a juggling game - how much risk do you want to take each time you leave your home base?

How Do You Like Your Zombie Flicks: Night Of The Living Dead, Or Shaun Of The Dead?

In my general experience, playing State of Decay 2 solo is a tense experience. Yes, you can choose to take along another survivor as backup, but it also means they’ll end up injured and tired out too. There can be some small banter as you drive together, but the solo experience really lets the dread of this game really sink in.

One of my favorite moments in these games is when you try and play it smart and it goes wrong. You sneak into a town area that has plenty of roaming hordes, carefully breaking into houses, getting the supplies you so desperately need. You sneak up on zombies and execute them in wonderful little animations. You feel badass. Then, suddenly, while looting, a zombie wanders into the room and you panic, accidentally grabbing for your very loud gun and firing it. The shambler is dead, but you look at your mini-map, and see dozens of red dots suddenly running at the house from all sides.

I really, really enjoy this side of the State of Decay series. The slow, methodical build up of tension that ramps up and then breaks into panic and adrenaline. Playing solo with good headphones, hearing the haunting music tracks adding a sense of unease as you watch the sun go down and the street in front of you light up with dozens of glowing eyes. The series is an homage to all different kinds of zombie flicks, and for me, it is at its best when you are forced to slow down and soak in the atmosphere. This is a world that is breaking down, and only through your hard work and sacrifices will anyone survive.

…of course, on the opposite end of the spectrum, you have the multiplayer State of Decay 2 experience.

Let me introduce you to my friend Bob. Let me reiterate that Bob is a good player, but as soon as he joins my game, I know things are going to go south quickly. Some context: when you play multiplayer with other people, you choose a character from one of your saved communities to essentially teleport into the world of the main player. If they die, it's a loss from that player’s community. If they find a good gun and keep it on their character, they’ll have it the next time they play. This is important to keep in mind because when Bob usually joins my games, he shows up with a full stack of explosive devices and an assault rifle. We are now playing a very different game than solo State of Decay 2.

During a charity stream we did before the pandemic, I had my friend Antonella - also already kitted out in army gear and quality weapons - and Bob join me for trying to play on Nightmare mode, a much higher difficulty. We knew it was going to be rough, but it was for the content. Part of me wanted to carefully build up my base and get some more survivors… but my friends, pockets full of grenades, really wanted to help clear the map first of plague hearts.

So this is how I ended up on the Meagher Valley map on a street with two plague hearts closeby. We had assaulted one, throwing explosives into an abandoned fire truck station, complete with collateral damage, until one plague heart died. Bob had to run away from the stream of zombies attracted by the noise, already very injured. Nella and I had a moment to reload and patch up, but the plague zombies from the second heart were now pissed, and we weren’t making progress any deeper. Everyone’s health was low, everyone was infected. I called out “I think we’re not going to make it!”

And that’s when Bob responded “Don’t worry - I have a car”, and moments later, a bright red sports car we had abandoned earlier crashed through dozens of zombies, already on fire and into a nearby wall. Explosives were thrown, we all piled into the rolling deathtrap, and took off, leaping out of the car seconds later before it detonated just outside of town. All of us running up the highway, shouting at each other, laying down the last of our bullets, and laughing in disbelief.

State of Decay 2 can go from feeling like Alien with a creeping claustrophobia that slowly hems you in… to Aliens, where the feeling of dread is still there, but you are surrounded by other players who are suddenly emboldened by camaraderie and having too many explosives on hand. Glorious, dangerous, and occasionally anticlimactic as your team chews through a city block with firepower.

And, sometimes, it all devolves into what feels like a Benny Hill chase sequence… like it does with Bob. After we ran up the highway, we got in another broken down car, drove towards our base, and promptly swerved off a cliff to avoid yet another terrifying zombie juggernaut that blocked our way.

Legacy Mode, Daybreak Mode, Heartland Mode… But Wait, There’s More!

State of Decay 2 is a haunted playground, and its up to the players if they want to sink into the horror aspect or go full B-movie action hero. Both are entirely viable options, each with their own drawbacks, but it can change the feel of the game dramatically. Indeed, zombie games appeal to players as either wild power fantasies or a survival challenge, and the way this series is set up straddles the line. Fortunately, the developers seemed to acknowledge this and kept working on more ways for players to customize their experience.

While the sequel came out in 2018, it was re-released in 2020 as State of Decay 2: Juggernaut Edition. It didn’t change anything, but instead collected the updates and new game modes that were added. The highlights:

• Daybreak Mode - It’s a horde mode, for when you want to just not worry about communities at all and just try and defend against waves of zombies. It’s fun, frenetic, and gets very hard. Has its own progression system, and found its great to wrap up a play session with friends to do a round.
• Heartland Mode - This is the mode I was most excited about. A separate story mode where you get to return to Trumbull Valley from the first game and see how the zombie situation has gotten worse, filling in a few gaps of the story between the first game and the core of the second.
• Updated Graphics - Just like the first game, the developers spent some time upgrading the graphics even after the base game was released, and this re-release was a way to really show the updates, especially to fog and lighting.
• New Base Content - A new map besides Trumbull Valley added to the game, making a total of five maps. Some more weapons, and the hilarious independence day drops… like a firework launcher you can use to stick explosives into zombies.

It’s a great list of content, and it doesn’t stop there. With the release of the final update, patch #38 on October 22nd, 2024, there have been so many adjustments to the game since its launch. The bounty broker added in game quests for killing various zombies in specific ways to get new customization skins, cars, and weapons… all rotating on a month-to-month basis. They added difficulty sliders so you could make communities meant for the experience you want, ramping up community building difficulty while keeping combat easier, or vice-versa. Most recently, they added curveballs, which I adore. Randomized modifiers such as making zombies nearly blind but can hear your footsteps better? Zombies that might explode when shot? Suddenly unable to radio for support actions?

This is all on top of an element that was added for State of Decay 2 - the Legacy system. This was a game made to be played how people wanted to, and the developers leaned in. Whenever you beat a campaign map (defeating all plague hearts, developing your community to elect a leader, completing enough quests and the final capstone quest with your leader), you can choose to have several of your leveled up survivors, complete with their end-state supplies, put into a legacy pool.

Secondly, based on the type of leader you win with, you unlock a boon you can use in other communities you start. Won with a builder? How does free electricity for your base sound from day 1? Want to start a campaign with a drop of high powered guns? Beat the game with a warlord! This all ties into the ideas given near the end of a run: that your little community is now a success, become stable, is attracting more, and now enterprising veterans want to head somewhere new to build another little haven against the zombies.

There is so, so, so much content here. The fact that you can buy it all in one package for $30 is a testament to some really dedicated game developers and a longstanding commitment to the community. This really was a game that was made, and then developed into, a huge post-apocalypse sandbox that can be fun just to drive around in and see what happens next.

The Glitchy Edges

Unfortunately, we have to talk about the things that can drag State of Decay 2 down. Just like the first game, there are a lot of rough edges, and in many ways they can feel more noticeable here in a game that was produced with a higher budget and a bigger team. Some of these things might not bother everyone who plays, but some might be deal breakers for others.

The first issue is simply glitches. The first time I played in 2018, I found myself backing out because the game was simply too glitchy for me at release. The game crashed occasionally, or I’d find myself trapped on the edges of objects at times. Those more dramatic issues have now gone away, but recently I did have a point where zombies in a deforested area spawned into the hillside terrain, stopping me from completing a quest. Driving cars in this game is much better than its predecessor (opening car doors into zombies is still an eternal joy), but going off-road can get your car trapped on jagged terrain easily.

Another hurdle to this game that is frustrating is the multiplayer itself. Now I haven’t had a lot of issues once people were in my game, but connecting to other players I’ve found to be a pain in the rear. It’s an Xbox Game Studios game after all, and so for multiplayer to work on steam, you have to connect to the Xbox game app as well to sync up. I’ve definitely lost a few minutes many gaming sessions as friends have a hard time being invited to my game, their systems attempting to connect to the Xbox app instead of steam itself, etc. It’s a bit trial and error, and can occasionally feel frustrating.

Finally, before I get to my own personal hang ups, I just have to reiterate that this game is an open world with procedurally generated zombie hordes, special infected, and loot. What this means is that State of Decay in general can oscillate wildly in how it feels to play. That common phrase about war being a mixture of boredom and hell can apply here, like it can to many survival-style games. You can spend two hours feeling more and more on top of the world, having flawlessly brought back supplies, built up your base, and even taken out plague hearts without a single zombie touching you. Then, suddenly, 500 feet away from your base, your favorite character dies as a feral zombie catches them alone when you stepped out of your base for a quick food run.

This last rough edge isn’t so much a problem with this game in particular as it is with the genre itself. Sometimes, circumstances are going to come together in ways that are horrible, and other times the game might feel almost too easy. I’ve run across the map to a survivor community after having my car blow up to recruit someone, only for a juggernaut to have chased me there, promptly tearing the recruit I wanted in half as my friends and I shout wildly that we’re out of ammo. It was a great moment that my friends all remember, but for someone else, it could be an experience that makes you want to give up for a while.

The Triumphs and Tribulations of Sandboxes

I’m going to preface this next part by saying that I genuinely think State of Decay 2 is a game worth buying. If you have any interest in zombie games or any of the game genres I’ve mentioned, this is a game that’s at least worth one attempt. It’s just a fun, solid game that can be played in so many different ways and styles that there’s going to be one element that appeals to you. Speed runners love seeing how long it takes to complete a campaign, while others really enjoy stretching out just how long they can keep a community alive, making one game last hundreds of hours as they slowly scavenge the entire map.

This is an enjoyable game that I’ve enjoyed for its building tension in single player games and its wild three-against-hundreds assaults in multiplayer. If you play and get hooked on the core gameplay loop, the sandbox base to this second game in the series offers so much to let you keep coming back for more.

This is where my own personal bias comes in. I truly think that State of Decay 2 is a better game. But I fear that State of Decay 1 has a better cohesive experience, and for that, makes me always pine for something that was lost in translation between the two.

*Small Spoiler Warning For The First State of Decay. If you want to play the games in order, jump to the final section now!*

State of Decay 2’s main campaign has a story, but it's one that’s nearly entirely self-directed and imagined by the player. You show up on the map, you mess around, you fight lots, you build your community, and you survive the last mission based on your leader type. How you get there is up to you, but it ends the same; a new community is founded, the procedurally generated characters archived or forgotten about. Rinse and repeat.

In comparison, State of Decay 1 looks the same on paper, but feels different in execution. There’s a zombie apocalypse, you slowly build up a community, you fight a lot of zombies, and you complete a final mission. There’s less variety of monsters, of maps, of replayability here, with there only being one linear ending.

But… there’s an actual beginning and an ending in the prequel. You start walking out of the woods into early stages of the zombie apocalypse, and you slowly meet characters as the army slowly gives up hope and abandons the area. You get an attachment to Lily Ritter, the radio control voice-in-your ear woman who was diagnosed with lupus, who you get medicine for. By the time you realize you have to escape the valley, there’s a sense of gravity that’s been put into the game.

It might be just nostalgia talking, but I fondly remember getting in the car with found survivors in the first game and hearing little bits about their life, their story, and what they lost. The second game feels like it has less of that, less little moments that give the world some cohesion and immersion. There is more world now, but I feel a bit adrift at times without a more directed narrative.

This doesn’t ruin the game for me, please understand. It just makes me wistful for the first game where I felt more invested. I like what State of Decay as a series is trying to set up; this sense of breakdown, of the world each game becoming a little stranger, a little harder to survive in. I would pay a few extra bucks for this game if you added a few hundred lines of dialogue between survivors, exploring that idea. That there’s a reason why a real new town needs to begin. Give me a little more reason to care about what I’m building, and this game would sing for me.

Enjoying What We Have While Still Looking Ahead

While I know I was sounding a bit harsh there, it’s just because State of Decay 2 falls into that frustrating category of feeling just inches away from greatness. I am so happy I own this game, and I’ve bought it for friends just to have big co-op experiences. I have laughed in person with people looking back at silly moments we had during multiplayer sessions, and felt a proper chill on my spine as a salvaging run suddenly makes too much noise. The amount of support and upkeep the folks at Undead Labs have done here for years should be applauded. This is a game that is worth every penny at full cost.

And yet… I crave more. I find myself when playing through the campaign wanting just a little more dialogue between characters, just a few more bread crumbs about the background plot as the zombie viruses get worse. I want there to be more plot, more reasons not just to like State of Decay as a game but as an experience, as a story.

The plague hearts are a great example. I enjoy their addition to the series, but it's all talked about quietly. It’s never explained how they began or what might happen next. The Heartland campaign gives a little more background lore to the world, but again, it's all left pretty up in the air. The lore of this world is more implied than spelled out, and there is so much potential here! Heck, even if they added just Dark Souls style found info, a huge portion of players would be happy to hunt it down during their games. I want more reasons to be invested.

It’s why I’m so hopeful after I saw the latest trailer for State of Decay 3 this summer. It shows off action, sure, and it doesn’t promise explanations about why the zombies began, but there is so much more emotional weight packed into those three minutes. The concept of State of Decay is so appealing to me. The idea of gathering a band of survivors, really feeling the loss as some die as you grow attached to them. Working hard to build a base, trying to salvage a world gone wrong. It’s wonderful. All the individual pieces are there.

The first game was an amazing if rough start. The second game polished the gameplay and expanded what could be done. Now, as we get closer to maybe getting a release date for the third game in the series, I’m hopeful that Undead Labs can nail the landing. Both games have been really good, and I’ll never say no to playing them… but they are so very close to making a great one.