State of Decay 2

Today I'm going to write about playing State of Decay 2.

First of all, I would like to say that I'm really enjoying the game. I already finished several times, both at the Standard, Dread Zone, and Nightmare Zone difficulty options.

Nothing is perfect although, so let's go the the State of Decay 2 annoyances list!

Bugs

This game has bugs. Lot's of them, mostly related to 3D collision detection.

Once I stabbed a zombie. He went down to the ground, kicked and then disappeared in the sky. Very immersive.

Cars

Using cars is a great game feature. It's fun and absolutely necessary if you don't want to die while traveling large distances.

But I felt disappointed now and then when I find a new car around, ready for the taking. The car might be far from my base, so traveling to on foot to get it seems a silly thing to do. On the other hand, in a real situation, anybody knows how to fix that: travel with a second person that can drive. Well, everybody in your party can drive, so what the heck I can't travel with a partner and let him/her get one of the cars?

Knowing that it will make things more complicated from the technical point of view, I guess nobody would care if the travel back to the base is not shown, exactly the same way it happens when you move to a new base.

Dumb partner

It's not advisable to travel alone. I lost characters that way when doing some "simple assignments" and getting surrounded by dead corpses and not being able to get away.

So, a partner is a necessity for not dying easily. The problem is that sometimes your partner is just stupid. God damn it, sometimes so stupid that I felt the need to kill them myself!

Once I was surrounded by zombies, and my partner started running around in circles. That's right, meanwhile my ass was being kicked, he was running around in circles, like a dog chasing his own tail.

I don't have an technical explanation for that but there are some simple tips to "fix" the partner stupidity:

• Add simple commands like "stay close", "attack only if attacked", "use only ranged weapons" and so far.
• Do not run towards the enemy if we are hidden, specially when the enemy is in large numbers.
• Don't f*** me when I'm trying to kill zombies one by one by jumping into the others.
• Use your f*** medicine if you life is too low. Heck, there is even an animation for that but the life is not recovered even though that are items in their inventories for that.

Sharing stuff

You can't share stuff with your partner. You have to toss them to the ground and switch between the characters.

Oh, sorry, you're in a mission, and if you switch, the mission will be canceled!

C'mon guys... that's an asshole excuse. Fix it.

Besides, being able to order your partner to "grab everything in that box" would be quite useful too. 

Scavenging is a really important part of the game, not sure why is not treated like that.

Let me shoot them

I'm tired to get that scene when I have to talk with cannibals. I already know they are cannibals, even though my characters are too dumb to figure that out. So, if I'm going to shoot them at the end, why not right now?

That's the kind of thing that doesn't make sense. I have a free map. I can skip missions if I want too. But I can't kill a bunch of cannibals right away.

Same thing applies for guys "demanding" resources. They can go f*** themselves, why I can't say that over the radio?

Grenade launcher

That's a heavy, slow, expensive and useless weapon in the game. There is no advantage at all in using it instead of a grenade. Once, while playing Heartland mode, I shot a feral in the face, twice, and the mother f*** didn't die. But I did, because was caught in the blast area.

Physicians are useless

That's another dumb choice. A physician should be required to apply medical care for anything more complicated than bruises and cuts. But they aren't.

Do you have internal organ injury? Not a problem! Take a nap here and it will be okay!

If you get an in infirmary, you don't need a physician at all. So what's the point to have one in your team?

I'm not looking for an absolutly immersive game here. Just want to have some common sense on it.

Button context functionality

Guess what? Xbox One control has 8 buttons, but most of the commands are done with Y button, and the exactly functionality depends on the context. So, every time I want to grab a zombie from the back I have to listen my partner replying that he/she can't talk right now.

Or when I want to refuel my car and ended inside of it.

And that kind of shit happens all the time. And that's annoying!

Translation

I'm a Brazilian, and the game states it has a "translation" to Brazilian Portuguese in the subtitles.

Yeah... translation my ass!

There are so many mistakes that my conclusion is that most probably a dumb north american (yes, most of them think that Portuguese and Spanish are the same languages) was using Google Translator all over.

Another annoyance is bringing in the game this never ending discussion about sexuality and gender. Many subjectives ends with an "x" in place of an vogal that would identify the character a male/female.

Let me tell you one thing: while I'm playing this game, I don't care about sexuality or gender or whatever about this subject discussion. It is the GOD DAMNED ZOMBIE APOCALIPSE! Nobody cares about your sexuality or how you want to be identified if there are living corpses in the streets, wanting to tear you apart for a snack.

Zombie teleportation

Yeah, the game might be difficult, you can't know for sure when you will hit a zombie group. But that doesn't mean I won't be upset when a group of zombies teleport themselves from nowhere. More immersion, please.

Tell us the story, bastards!

The game is becoming old already... and it is not telling what the heck happened with the USA.

There are just teasers about what is exactly going on, and no answers at all. Somebody needs to write that story, and soon.

That's the main reason about why Heartland sucks. You f*** yourself the whole game to destroy the "walls" without any good reason.

Conclusion

Bring on the third release of this game, hopefully fixing the shit I wrote about it. No need to reinvent anything, just fix what is necessary and extend the game story!

Lords of the Fallen - gimme my money back!

 

I just asked for a refund for this game for Microsoft Store. That's right, a refund.

Why?

Well... this game sucks in a lot of ways.

If you asked me, the game attracted me for three reasons: graphics, fighting and sold as a RPG. I wrote "sold as" because there is absolutely no more RPG in there than playing Street Fighter. What a heck, probably Street Fighter has more roleplaying than this game.

Harkin, the main character with a ugly face above is the one you're to suppose to endure with to the rest of the game. He is a convicted. For what? I don't know since the story sucks... I suppose that's because the way he fights, there must be a law for that.

This guy so slow that seems to me he's doing a colonoscopy during all the fights.

It is unbelievable he is even called a fighter (that's the build I selected) due the unbelievable lack of speed on his attacks. All his movements are terrible and the challenge here is to get the right timing to try to hit. Yeah, try because this fighter is the slowest creature in the game. Any enemy that I had found was faster than he is, doesn't matter the size of the creature, anything can hit or dodge faster than Karkin.

Then I tried to change the armor or weapons... nope, not so many improvements after that. At the start, I equipped "too many" items on him that I got a message that he was overburdened. My first thought was "well, time to drop something". Nope. You can't drop anything. You can't sell it either, specially because there is no coin in the game. Did I say that there is no roleplaying in this game?

Wait, wait... isn't that a matter to invest experience in the Agility attribute? No buddy... Agility only increases the damage of quick weapons. Hell, who needs to be fast during a brawl, right?

Is he powerful? No. Sometimes his damage is ridiculous. There is no compensation for playing with such slow character, as usually expected.
 

He can use some really big weapons, but they are too slow to be useful. Unless the enemy cooperates (which they don't) it will be impractical to hit something with it.

Does he have any magical power? Yeah, but they suck too. The gauntlet is the most useful item in the game, but the damage is also minimal and you can use just a few times because your "magical energy" is done after 3 or 4 hits.

There is another spell (which I don't recall the name, but who cares?) that is a stupid decoy of you and it's suppose to heal some of your energy back before it goes away. At the second level, the amount of energy was not enough to keep up from a single blow from the weakest enemy around.

Camera in the game sucks as hell too. You can "track" the enemy by marking it with the R3 button, so if you turn around, the camera will keep the enemy at the center. Looks useful? Well, think again when you have two or more enemies at the same time. Most of times you will need to run as hell... But then the character will get tired really quickly.

That's right, the character will get tired too. You can buy some "vigor" (or whatever the name of the attribute is, I don't care) to enhance that. After three or four hits that energy is gone, he will be too tired to even dodge.

What about the roleplaying? No existent. Yep, nothing there. You can have some dialogs, but the only option there is to select the sequence of questions/answers. The game is totally linear, you can try to go around a bit to stray away from the "main path" of the game, but if you do that you will just get killed really fast due meeting with too strong enemies for your level. Boy, I do miss Fallout 2 quality on that.

I guess the idea was to make this game difficult to play. It is difficult, but to the level of frustration because it is basically helpless to improve the character. Runes are a shit bonus you will get at the expense of the hard earned experience points, so that's it, you're FUBAR.

Finally I just asked for a refund before lost my grip and smashed the Xbox One console. Keep away from this title.