You play as Marcus Campbell, who worked at a grocery store before the apocalypse. There are so many things to do you might forget there is a story. The best option is melee options - swords and bats - but they break over time. There are about 100 guns, and many have sound suppressing options that don’t attract zombies. Ammo and weapons are some of the most sought after and useful survival tools. If you end up having a surplus you can trade some of your supplies for ammo with other survivor groups. Once you have a safe place to live, you can go get food and medicine at abandoned supermarkets and even grow food in your garden.
If you choose a good place for a base there will be several options such as watch towers, gardens, medic centers and barricades.
If you go out and scavenge all the time it is possible to last a while but the only real way to make it is by building a base and recruit other members. If you explore too long and don’t find food and water you could die, or if you don’t find shelter when night falls you are in real trouble. If you don’t pay attention to your character’s needs, like hunger, you won’t last long. The difficult thing about the game, besides the hordes of zombies, is being able to survive with finite resources. One of the most interesting selling points of the game is the huge open world, which develops in real-time. You have to scrounge for gear, supplies, construct and fortify your base, and build a community of followers. “State of Decay” is a third-person action game all about survival. With the re-release, it has had several years of polish to both the visuals and the gameplay, along with all the DLC. I never got to play the original but, from what I hear, it was quite buggy and hard to manage. Over the past few years, there have been dozens of zombie games but none had the level of realism as “State of Decay.” Previously released on PC, the “Year One: Survival Edition” is now on Xbox One.