Dead State - Review @RPS

Although Alec Meer criticises a lot of game systems in Dead State: Reanimated, he pays his respect at the end of his review for Rock, Paper, Shotgun:

I do like it, though. Quite a lot more so than this piece probably suggests, and that’s because it’s a game which is far more successful in theme and tone (harder to convey in text) than it is in features. Getting through another day feels meaningful despite the barrage of numbers and the parroted lines. Fights are chilling, flexible and unpredictable rather than perfunctory. Error is a result of your choices rather than an enforced event. The wider world is a sinister, uncharted mystery, with your never quite knowing what’s out there until you encounter it. Decisions are painful. People are problematic. Murder feels bad. The downbeat prettiness of its world is littered with small details, hints of the communities that once were and the fearful squatters that have replaced them.

In terms of recreating the second act of an … of the Dead or 28 x Later film, that point where the world has fallen, scattered survivors have found shared refuge and now they need to take risks to maintain it, Dead State is probably as close as we get. I would say that Dead State probably has too many parts and doesn’t quite know how to fit them all together cleanly, but it just about manages to be more than the sum of them.

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More information.

I played the new version for two hours or so, just did the tutorial and the first mission, but actually wasn't too impressed yet.

The game basically still bombards you with things which feel not right.

It starts at the very first tutorial area (crashed airplane). When you check some of the interface elements, you start getting tips as if you were already in the base saying something "do this and that when you leave the base next time".
Then my people got effected, but there was no tooltip on the status effect, so I had no Idea what had happened. Same as the ability you can use in fight. No tooltip. To check it you need to open the character window.
Some of the tooltips have an own graphic style. Some just have the Windows/Word "Tooltip" style, like if you hover over the chat elements "Bold" in this forum when writing a post. This inconsistency feels cheap.
The process in the taskbar isn't even called DeadState but Torque which is like if I bookmark this forum and would get a "my html page" as title in the bookmark folder. When loading it says something like C:\zrpg, which doesnt make any sense at all as its not even installed there..

Two of my people got infected. One of them was the monther. Back in the base when going to sleep the daughter showed up crying about her mom. Well…guess what happened after that dialogue…she just showed up again and had the exact same text. The event fired twice.
Also the controls still feel off. Engaging in a fight feels bad, especially because "end combat" and "next turn" is the same key. You want to engange a zombie close by and want to position your guys, but it just doesn't feel as good as in a Jagged alliance or even a Avernum where the game switches from Real time to Turnbased. Also the item management with party members feels clunky.

It also seems that they basically require you to read the forums /read the manual to play the game as some essential information is not in the game (does the time go by outside of traveling? What about the first named character cindy? Do you have to kill her? How to equip other characters in base? Can you have dialogues with other characters and use their skill for that?)

I just started to read the manual and read like there is a key (z/y) for highlighting lootable objects and that you can only get talents on the main character, which were both incredibly important infos.

Speaking of the manual…who the hell writes something into the manual like "Please do not save or load the game when it is already loading." If that is really in the game, that is really unprofessional.

And this was also experienced in just 2 hours...guess there is more...

I set the game on Hold again…will probably look at it again later. But I guess I will play massive chaile first, which is another tactics game coming out soon.
For now Dead State has a similar appeal to be as Jagged Alliance flashback, which I also only played for an hour or so, and which felt kinda ok, but also quite cheap.

does it seem a little less…. boring than it's always looked???

To me, the videos up to this point have made it look absolutely coma-inducing

I guess I should read the review

And I thought now would be right time to start playing it. I will wait more, hope they continue to improve it.

The game depicted in the article reads exciting. Wish I could play it.

It could have been a great game. Alas, time to move on.