John Paul M. Joaquin Games 06.13.2023 00:Jun AM EDT

[RETRO GAMING] Do You Remember the Xbox 360 Game State of Decay?

The zombie genre in the video game industry may have started with the original 1996 Resident Evil game, but it was during the early to mid-2010s when the genre saw its popularity rise to greater heights.

Popular media at the time seemingly caught a virus that made it obsessed with any zombie-related entertainment. These include TV shows like AMC's "The Walking Dead," Brad Pitt's "World War Z," and various video games like Plants vs. Zombies and Telltale's The Walking Dead.

While pop culture saturated the genre with many entries, there is one game that gave people the experience of surviving in a zombie apocalypse with other people without it relying on online gameplay.

That game is State of Decay.

State of Decay History, Features

State of Decay is a third-person survival-horror game developed by Undead Labs and published by Microsoft Studios for the Xbox 360 in June 2013, per the State of Decay Wiki. It was eventually released for the PC in September of the same year, expanding how gamers can enjoy the game.

State of Decay places players in the fictional town of Trumbull Valley, located in the State of Washington, US, whose population is suffering from the effects of an unknown disease that turns those infected with it into flesh-eating zombies. Players first get introduced to the infected as one of two unique characters struggling to survive in the new order of things.

These characters serve as the ones players can use during the tutorial; they can use any other character they wish once they meet up with a community of survivors in an abandoned church. From here, things are left to the player's hands.

State of Decay offers a wide range of freedom for the player to explore and play out their fantasies of how they'd survive a zombie apocalypse. They could scavenge for life-supporting supplies and meet new survivors, who may or may not be as friendly as they are.

Players can also build up and enhance the facilities of their base until it's time to move on from it or until supplies run out. Of course, building up a base of operations counts for nothing if players don't have the right amount of people to run and protect it while players are away.

As such, players can recruit survivors from small enclaves to beef up their security and expand the list of characters they can play as; players can't use the same character for too long as the game's mechanics would force them to switch to another sooner or later.

These survivors can improve their skills as players take them out to the field, but if they're not careful, zombies could kill them, permanently removing them from the game.

State of Decay Reception, Additional Features

Despite the opportunities it provides, State of Decay is one game where critics and gamers didn't see eye-to-eye in some cases. Many critics, like Hooked Gamers and PC Powerplay, lauded the game's mechanics, per Metacritic; players appreciated what the game offers, but its bugs and seemingly mandatory use of a controller on the PC didn't help the game's case in the gaming community.

As a result, the game got a Metascore of 79 and a user score of 6.9. Thankfully, Undead Labs and Microsoft Studios worked on the game and made it as playable on PC as possible. It even released two new modes for players to enjoy: Breakdown is the game's sandbox mode, where they can do what they want without being restricted by the game's plot.

Lifeline, meanwhile, gives players a taste of what military life could be like during the zombie apocalypse and what's to come in its sequel, State of Decay 2.