State of Decay: Year One Survival Edition (Console version)

The game’s core gameplay loop found an audience and whilst many struggled with the way the game ran, it did really well commercially, spawning an updated version for the newer Xbox One two years on from the original release entitled Year One Survival Edition. Take into account the predictably poor artificial intelligence and it’s one of the most technically incompetent by any measure.The original State of Decay launched back in June 2013 and became somewhat of a sleeper hit on the Xbox 360, despite being widely slated for its technical performance and huge dose of jank throughout. Add in some already bland art design and you’ve got one of the worst looking games on the Xbox One. The collision detection is just as bad as ever too, with both you and zombies often disappearing through solid walls as if you were both ghosts.ĭespite promised improvements the frame rate remains widely uneven, giving the impression that this is some game just days into it’s Early Access alpha – not one of the most successful games ever on Xbox Live Arcade, that’s already been out for two years. There’s still an enormous amount of texture and object pop-in, and although the graphics now run at 1080p it just means the game ends up looking like the world’s highest resolution PlayStation 2 game. Considering zombies never group in hordes of more than a dozen it seems odd that you don’t just bum-rush the lot of them with your whole team.Īll of these issues were present in the original version and none of them have changed to any significant degree on the Xbox One, in fact they just seem worse thanks to the passage of time and the fact that they’re on a more powerful machine. But perhaps the strangest fault is that you’re almost always fighting alone, with morale-boosting hunting missions with depressed townspeople being one of the rare exceptions. There are hand-crafted story missions but these fare little better. This might not necessarily have been a problem if the mission design was any better but it too is obviously randomly-generated, and the small range of escort missions and treasure hunts are extremely repetitive and never evolve beyond the sort of ‘Kill X monsters’ mentality of early stage massively multiplayer online games.

State of Decay: Year One Survival Edition (Console version)