Zombie games are incredibly popular, and like most people, I love them too. In fact, I may not be the best person to review Dead State, because I tend to give zombie games a little more leeway than most, and this game could use a little bit of it. For an indie game created by a small team of people, it’s pretty darn good. But there are also quite a few flaws that will limit the enjoyment. The game came out in December, but I wanted to wait to do the review until they got some of the major flaws patched up. It’s much better now, though there are still problems.
Dead State begins with a plane crash. Rescued from the burning wreckage, your character wakes up from a coma to find out that the plague that was just starting to spread around the globe, and which brought down your airplane when an infected passenger went wild, has more or less destroyed society. You are suck in the basement of an elementary school deep in the heart of Texas, with only a broken fence and a small handful of other survivors standing between you and certain death at the hands of the undead.
For much of the game, that is the only plot you will know, though it works well enough. Later in the game you will learn more about what is really going on, and certain end-game strategies start to become clear.
Dead State is a hybrid turn-based strategy game and role-playing strategy title. The entire game centers on the school where your group of survivors is held up. Unlike 2013’s State of Decay, you can’t pull out and move to a new building. It’s your base of operations for the duration.
The importance of the fortress is shown in the early tutorial type missions. The school was renovating their fence when the world went to hell, so there are huge gaps all along the perimeter. Your first mission outside the fortress is to gather construction materials which can be used to repair the gaps. Luckily, there is a nearby hardware store that just happens to have the pile of stuff you need. This first mission is more or less a go-fetch type of affair, though later on you can find loose construction materials – as well as other things like food, gas, antibiotics and luxury items – which are needed to maintain the health of both the fortress and those who are sheltering inside. Even the fence degrades over time due to pressure from wandering zombies and requires constant repairs.
The cool thing about base management is that it gives characters who are not out on the away missions something to do, and something critical. Every day you will likely want to take a team of people with you out on scavenging runs, but you also need to assign things for the folks back home to do. Home base assignments are planned out on a job board. Some jobs, like digging out a well that the school had closed off for safety reasons, only require a laborer, so anyone can work on them. Other jobs require some level of skill such as electrical repair or medical training.
Especially at first, you won’t have enough people to do everything that you want, at least not quickly. One survivor trying to construct a new facility by themselves might take several days to accomplish the task, if you are lucky and nothing else comes up to warrant their attention. Thankfully, there are other NPCs out there in the world looking for a home, so you are able to bring in lots more people over time. The negative side effect to this is that people consume resources like food and medicine. The more people you have, the more pressure there is to find or produce those staples every day. There are also luxury items to worry about, which are necessary to keep morale high. Having people get too depressed or too angry to work is worse than not having them at all. There will also be times when you have to step in and take care of a personal situation or mediate a dispute within the shelter, which is a nice little RPG touch that helps to make Dead State more realistic.
The home base is also important because it determines how often you level up your character. To get more points to put into abilities and skills, you have to improve your fortress. That is interesting because it makes it so that you don’t have to kill every zombie out there in the world just to get experience points. If you can sneak into a store, put a screwdriver into the skull of the old store clerk turned walking dead monster, and get out cleanly, it’s really better than going in and shooting up the entire town – and far less risky.
Graphically, the game is passable for a top-down isometric interface. It looks a bit dated, nothing like the new Wasteland 2 game which has a similar interface, but you can at least tell what everything is in Dead State. Unless you are a serious graphics snob, you shouldn’t have a problem with it. The sound is the same as the graphics, fairly basic, but passable. There is a nice little background soundtrack for different areas, though you can expect a lot of reading instead of voice work, though this is expected with most indie games. Again, unless you really need to hear everyone speaking in games, the sound here works fine.
Missions are either assigned based on what someone says or hears – ie. the radio tells you that a new burger joint was just about to open the next day before the zombies took over – or you can uncover places on your map by simply walking near them. The map is rather huge and you can walk in any direction. Points of interest will either populate as you hear about them, or when you get close. You do have to take travel time into consideration too, as you have to be back each evening before it gets dark. Eventually you can find a vehicle which greatly extends your range. Then your main consideration will be finding, or finding a way to make, gasoline to be able to drive it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tywZCgR8tyU
Unfortunately, the turn-based combat is one of the weakest features of Dead State. It’s an action point based system, but it’s difficult to tell what attacks are going to be successful. Advanced features like overwatch, levels of cover or the ability to hit certain body parts are non-existent. Your only option is a few different ways to swing your melee weapons, or selective fire on some guns. There doesn’t even seem to be any consideration for flanking or attacking from behind. So you often do something like walk up to a zombie and bash him from behind three times with a golf club and his health state goes down to almost dead, yet he simply turns around and mauls you on his turn. Early in the game, you might have three characters surrounding a zombie, have the element of surprise, and still not be able to take them down.
Inside buildings, the flaws with the combat engine really begin to show. Tight corridors and side rooms act as chokepoints that limit your already limited tactical options. Friendly characters can’t pass through each other’s spaces, so having someone end their turn in a hallway outside of a door could effectively block the rest of your team from being able to do anything at all. If zombies move in, it further locks everyone in place and all but ensures grievous injury or even death for the character stuck in the open. The scale just seems to be off, with many buildings having one or two space hallways that invite cluster-flubs.
On a positive note, the game does take noise into consideration, which is one of the only advanced features of the combat engine. When you run into human opponents, looters or rival factions, you almost always need to resort to firearms because they will have them too. But that noise will attract the zombies, who will start to shuffle your way. This does lead to some interesting strategies, though they are difficult to implement. If you run into a bad-looking group of human enemies, you can toss some fireworks into them, then pull back and let the zombies do the rest. Then sweep in and finish off whoever or whatever is left weakened but still standing.
The final set of problems with Dead State are likely going to be the ones that drive people away: the bugs. There is just about every type of bug you can think of in Dead State. The game crashes fairly often. It crashed six times during our 45-hour testing of the game, so not horrible, but somewhat unacceptable for a finished product that has been out for a full month, and which is being sold for the near premium price of $30 through the Steam online service and other places. More unforgivable from my perspective is the fact that many of the end games are bugged. I’m a huge fan of story, so when the developers remove certain endings from the game, yet forget to also remove the characters who start those chains in motion, it’s highly annoying. Some ending paths let you get pretty far before it becomes apparent that you can’t actually accomplish them. Other bugs include things like zombies meshing together or getting clipped on the environment and survivors in your party not able to follow your lead because they are hung up on something or stuck at the bottom of a staircase.
Dead State is a fun game to play despite its flaws, and the developers continue to work on new patches and updates. It’s entirely possible that Dead State could improve more over time – likely even. But even in its current state, it’s worthwhile game for zombie lovers to check out.