![]() If strong and healthy such stumbles can be shrugged off, but for wounded or weakened characters it can be disastrous, as zombies will continue to munch as the turns tick by. Zombies can knock chunks of health off with a swipe, and can also grapple characters and knock them to the floor. Action points are spent moving and attacking, with the expected chance-to-hit percentages resulting in equally expected moments of frustration as a character lethargically swings a machete at thin air, somehow managing to miss the cannibalistic cadaver standing directly in front of them. Unlike similar games where every can of beans is hard-earned, here you'll return from your foraging expeditions laden with goodies.Ĭombat, meanwhile, is old school and turn-based. Despite the apocalypse, the world is still surprisingly well stocked. Inventory management is fairly simple, as a right click changes your pointer to enable healing, item swapping or attacking. Once arrived at a destination, you explore much as you would in the original Fallout games, which Dead State resembles in several ways. Your character has perks, based on their characteristics, that will help you find more loot or give an advantage in combat. Sometimes your journey is interrupted by an incident along the way, which you can choose to react to, or you may detect other visitable locations on the way. You click on your destination on the world map, and then watch as your marker makes its way there, Indiana Jones style. The bulk of the game is split between walking around the cavernous empty school, talking to your fellow survivors and finding out what they need, and heading out into the world with whoever you think will be useful in the field. The only pressing job is patching up the fence outside, but that's easily done. There's a small but useful arsenal of weapons already in place, including a few firearms. There's a decent amount of food put aside, and some medical supplies. Refreshingly, you don't need to seek out shelter. Staggering from the wreckage, a brisk tutorial gets you up to speed on movement and combat, before delivering you into the arms of the survivors whose fate you'll get to decide. ![]() Of course, we know what's going on and, sure enough, somebody is infected on the plane and you crash in the Texas desert. The game proper kicks off in a series of static cutscene slides, with you aboard a domestic flight - one of the last to take off before a mounting medical emergency closes all the airports. Strength, charisma, mechanical skills - it's all predictable enough. The options are hardly generous, but you do get to select the traits that will define what sort of leader you'll be in the zombie-infested dystopia. You start, as you so often do, by creating your character. Generic and scruffy are hardly the sort of adjectives likely to entice a wider audience, and that's a pity since beneath its seemingly mouldy exterior, Dead State is also compelling, clever and strangely satisfying. ![]() There's no stealth option, but you quickly learn that bashing down a locked door attracts the wrong sort of attention. Admittedly, this is a criticism that is more and more relative now that we have million dollar blockbusters launching with code held together with spit and prayers, but anyone who plonks down the £22 to download Dead State on Steam will be forgiven for balking at the multiple rough edges sticking out all over the place. The other big hurdle that Dead State faces is that despite now having officially left Early Access and launching as a full finished game, it's still creaky as hell. That's not to say there's nothing left to be mined from this idea - or that other genres are immune to repetition - but by Saint Romero's neatly trimmed beard, it often seems like five of these things shamble up every week. You just need to be prepared to carve your way through a lot of sloppy meat to find it.įor one, you need to overcome any weariness you may feel towards yet another game based around foraging for planks and tinned food, while fending off the undead and diplomatically keeping a community of survivors from tearing itself apart. There's a really good RPG in the guts of Dead State, the latest in a very long line of crowdfunded, early-accessed survival games.
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