State of Decay

[Cyrrex]

I think it should be said that escorting in State of Decay works better than most, generally speaking, probably because the NPCs manage to be pretty good in combat for the most part and don't die super easy.  I never had one die on me in the original campaign that I can recall.  Pathing wasn't terrible either.  I didn't think much about the AI at the time, which probably says something about its quality.  Maybe having a squad dynamic changes that to some extent.

[Hoax]

Arise!

I just beat the base game in 45 hours (per steam, definitely inflated because I left it running at times because I needed to do something mid-mission) and it was quite good. Then I was curious and I found out that there are not a ton but some mods on Nexus. Which obviously is awesome if people can fix up some of the weaker parts of the game. I already see a mod claiming to make driving feel less "arcadey". Yes pls to that.

Overall what I felt like the game was missing most was options akin to X-Com that let you really tweak the difficulties. Snacks and painkillers were just way too overpowered, hordes were probably not big enough (by the end Marcus could solo a horde with one snack easily) and in general zombie bites just weren't a big enough deal. They didn't make you sick, they didn't do that much damage, they didn't take you out of the fight or make you unavailable for missions or seem to mess up morale. Some of that was definitely needed because at some point nothing but big fuckers and ferals put me into survival mode or made me think about using a gun and I let way to many people get bit or swiped because it wasn't worth using a snack to save 5% of my hp.

Hopefully mods and/or the dlc's fix some of that. But to anyone who bought the game this steam sale and hasn't started it yet you might want to check out Nexus for some simple QoL fixes.

The bugs didn't bother me that much but it did get old realizing that zombies just spawned when there needed to be zombies, that probably caused the most damage to my immersion along with the fact that a zombie biting a npc's neck wasn't worth stopping my own fight to deal with.