Dead State - Review @ Rock Paper Shotgun

Capt. Huggy Face said:

I play on a gaming laptop — which is about 5 years old now and far from top of the line, though it has a dedicated graphics card — and I haven't had a single crash in 26 hours of play, according to Steam.

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I had about 15.

mbpopolano24 said:

The game has some fun in it, but overall it is a disappointment.

1. First and foremost, it is not finished. Bugs and random CTD all the times.
2. The interaction with other survivors is, as RPS indicated, quite silly. Not much of a RPG there.
3. Zombies stand there and wait to be killed. Just walk, or even run, to them and club them in the head. Rinse and repeat… forever…. Sooo boring.
4. Battles with humans are better, until you learn that the AI is brain dead and you can just exploit the environment (or the pause function) to kill anybody from the very beginning.
5. The story is cliche and unimaginative.
6. The only good part is the sandbox in which you struggle to find resources.
7. So many design limitations are just infuriating: Why can I leave the map just from a specified area? Why I must be in that area to check the time? Why everybody is standing still? Why can I enter building only through doors? I have explosive and such, and I see windows everywhere… What is going on with the second floor in this game? Why everybody must go to bed at 8?….

In summary, yes, it can be fun, but the sad reality is that it deserves the lackluster reception it had (already out of the Steam top list) because it is a mediocre, low budget game.

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CTDs might happen. Never got one.

Point 6 oppose points 3 and 4. Being able to kill anybody means direct access to resources. When killing things, you automatically bathe into resources as long as you comply with the routine of looting containers. There cant be other way.

Point 7: related to zombies. A high noise level attracts zombies from the outskirts. Zombies enter the scene from the same zones. When this works well, it will means that the player will have to cut through waves of zombies if the party is too noisy (some locations have only one entry/exit zone etc)

The game is not buggy anymore in my experience.

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It is buggy. The last update broke the game. There is no game breaking bugs but the product is riddled with bugs, in all sorts and kinds.

I bought this game ages ago but never could really get into it in beta. And now that it's out I plan to wait til they patch it some before digging in.

rune_74 said:

Really? You want there to be an end to crowd funding?

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I like the idea of crowd funding - great way for games that would otherwise likely not get made to get made - even if there are so many indies out there making awesome games WITHOUT having to have players foot the bill in advance.

What I don't like is developers getting their games 100% funded by the community then turning around and charging as much as humanly possible for the game and making millions upon millions. If you're going to have the community fund your game, price it to be the benefit of the community, not as developer win the lotto at the expense of the community.

I'd like to see a little less greed out of developers who get games 100% funded with low/zero risk or investment of their own. Give back to the community that "employed" you for the duration of the development and who let you make the game of your dreams.

I especially love it when these greedy bastages say they charge high prices to benefit their backers - so they don't insult them or anything. That's a hot one. Yeah, love it, we need to line our pockets with extra cash because backers like seeing us use their money to get rich.

In the end, the developers would probably make as much money selling some of these games for half the price since they'd sell more copies.