Undead Labs’ State of Decay launched back in 2013 and rode the waves of popularity in the zombie apocalypse genre. Now with its second major installment State of Decay 2, the open world survival horror game series aims to be bigger and better than the original game.
Here are five reasons why you should be excited.
Upgraded User Experience
More information! The updated user interface is now cleaner and more in-depth, offering more options, better descriptions of equipment, and nearly every piece of information for your home base you could need.
The map and its icons are also extremely intuitive and help offer some much-needed direction in this apocalyptic wasteland. Add these features to a much more dynamic looking character selection screen and you have a winning user experience.
Character-Specific Missions
While playable survivors are procedurally generated, they now come with their own character-specific missions. Upon returning to your home base and accessing the community menu, characters will have little icons next to their names, signifying that they have a mission.
Switching to that character will automatically initiate the mission and if the character dies or you switch to a different character, the mission will be abandoned. Completing character missions is imperative for gathering materials quicker and upgrading your base. For us, these missions varied greatly from clearing out outposts to mowing down zombies in a sweet ride.
These were just a small taste and we expect to see even more when the full game launches later this month.
The More the Scarier
With new drop-in, drop-out co-op capability, players can now survive alongside their friends. Like with any other ally, friendly fire is turned off and all loot is color-coded, divided between each player.
Everyone gets their own stuff, so stealing and griefing isn’t too much of a worry. Inviting a random player into your world can still be dangerous — if they decide to bring a horde to your base and you die, it’s still permanent.
There are a few drawbacks to joining up with others. First off, any supplies deposited at their base goes completely to them. However, all character experience and item pickups will remain. Players will still be rewarded with other bonuses when returning to their own game for time spent away.
Get Down With the Sickness
While getting nibbled on by a zombie wasn’t too big of a deal in the original game, now it can be a ticket to a quick death. Plague zombies still have the same vulnerabilities of others, but come with the added threat of infecting your character.
Getting attacked by these distinct plague zombies with a fleshy, blood-red appearance will infect you with the plague. Once infected, a meter will appear in the lower hand corner and begin to fill up. An infected character will inevitably become a plague zombie, forcing the player to use resources to cure them or decide on how to get rid of them.
Fight for Fuel
While it was mostly used for explosives or generators in the previous games, fuel is now vital to another important resource in the game: Cars.
The days of endlessly driving around, wherever and whenever you want are over. In addition to cars being few and far between, they are now more realistic in requiring gas. Players will need to micromanage their cars now, as each has their own individual fuel meters that need to stay topped off. Unless you want to find yourself stranded in the middle of nowhere and forced to hoof it back to base.
Cars – and their ability to store items for the player – are extremely valuable, as each character’s inventory is limited by the size of their backpack and their maximum carry weight.
Final Thoughts
State of Decay 2 is definitely shaping up to capitalize on the remaining popularity of zombies and the survival genre. Thankfully, it’s coming back with some great new additions while enhancing what was enjoyable in the first game. State of Decay 2 is scheduled to release May 22, 2018, on Xbox One and PC.
To see each of these new features plus more in action be sure to check out the State of Decay wiki and our video above.
