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Someone having a bad day? Perhaps they’ll eat more food. Like a classic D&D role-playing game, survivors have relationships with each other, which can have a direct effect on the group as a whole. The other major aspect to surviving in State of Decay 2 is building up a strong collective of survivors. It also allows you to access your stash so you can drop off items you’ve gathered out in zombie-infested suburbia without having to travel all the way back to your main base of operations. Establishing new outposts is one of the best things you can do with your influence as buildings will automatically produce some of those core materials over the course of a day. It’s also used to claim new buildings once you’ve cleared the zombies out of them. Influence is the currency used to trade, upgrade, and improve your characters. Outside of those core materials, the other important resource in State of Decay 2 is “influence,” which is earned from killing zombie hordes, clearing out infestations, helping other communities, and other survival actions. These items and upgrades like explosives, repair kits, bonus production stats, allow your group of survivors to grow. Each of these zones utilize raw materials you find in the world to build critical components for survival. Maintaining a consistent supply of these materials comprises much of the core gameplay loop as they keep your expanding community of survivors happy and healthy, and also allow you to upgrade sections of your base with specialized zones like a medical tent, garden, workshop, and more. From there you’ll scavenge nearby houses, restaurants, stores, and other buildings for materials - Food, Weapons and Ammo, Building Supplies, and Medical supplies. Your first task after going through the initial tutorial mission is to setup a base of operations. It’s an extremely focused survival game with strong story-based elements that drive and guide you through the loop of gathering resources, building up your base, and surviving the zombie hordes.Īs the game starts you’ll pick a pair of survivors to play as. This is where I think State of Decay 2 sets itself apart. There are hundreds of games now that fall into the “survival game” genre, but in my opinion, very few pack the narrative “oomph” to push them into something engaging (I can only collect 10 sticks to build an axe so many times).
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