DEAD STATE

I kickstarted this waybackwhen and have been spending most of my free time playing it.

It has excellent bits. And it has bad bits. It's definitely not a game for everyone.

Gameplaywise it is sort of clunky. The battle system is a turn based one with action points, fairly similar to the original fallouts. And like the original fallouts it is also very basic. There's no stances or overwatch features. Any unused actions points are just unused. So the game often becomes hit once and run away, repeat. The lack of overwatch does help in making the zombies more threatening since you can't just fool a zombie to walk towards you and then just kick his ass as he gets close.

The most intersting thing about the battle system is the "sound system". Every weapon has a sound and if you make to much noise the zombies will come after you. I've used this to lure zombies into a firefight with regular people and then run away and let the living people fight the rest of the dead while I deal with stragglers. (of course every living person killed by a zombie will then return as a zombie. But at least they won't fire guns at you)

The other interesting bit of this game is the shelter home base of the player. You find survivors in the wild and collect supplies to keep the shelter going. And these people can then have various interpersonal relationships and crises can happen and you have to deal with them. And dealing with them might make certain people unhappy or happy depending on your choices. It's all very statistics-driven. I guess you could compare it to dating sims or something. Where you try to keep certain people's moods up by giving them luxury items you find in the wild.

The base also has a number of improvements that you can build. To grow food and increase morale and other fairly interesting bits.

The locations you find when wandering the nearby area is also pretty good. There's no procedurally generated things here so I wonder how much replayability there is (there is probably plenty, considering that I've already collected about 20 survivors and nearly all are optional). But the fact that everything is hand-crafted makes it so that there's all these tiny stories within each location. You can see the blood marks dragging towards a door. The dead bodies of a couple lying in a bed. All the usual stuff.

Overall I like it. It's a kind of zombie game I've been looking for. An open experience, but still designed and somewhat story-driven (not heavily so, but as far as I know there is an endgame and I think I might have touched upon it already, though I'm not entirely sure). The combat gameplay is unexciting but passable. (The other kickstarted turn-based game Wasteland 2 has a much more robust combat system, they are similar in many ways, but Wasteland 2 is just better)

The game also suffers from some bugs. Some have already been fixed and I'm sure they are working on fixing more. So waiting before buying might be a good call. Maybe a price drop if you're into that. (I know I am :)

Well I know that a big source of inspiration was the Zombie Survival Guide.

And I don't know what possible negative things you could have heard about Wasteland 2. Except it being very late 90s, both in interface and difficulty. But I know loads of people who would see that as a major positive.


When it comes to zombie games Dead State was one of those I was really looking forward to. Scratching one of the zombie itches that don't get scratched. With it done I guess now all I have to look forward to is the completion of Project Zomboid and then maybe I'll finally be done with zombies?

I played a zombie rogulike once. It was fairly simple but captured the theme pretty well. I think it was called Zomband. It was mercifully short with a high score table thingie I think. Cataclysm looks interesting at a glance, does it have a massive learning curve?