Welcome to my review and conclusion to Dead State, a tactic role-playing game in which we have to lead a group of survivors through a zombie apocalypse.
Before we get to the actual game, we first look at the development of the project.
The developer studio is called DoubleBear and will probably not say anything to most people. The project lead and designer of the game, Brian Mitsoda, however, could know one or the other, as he is significantly responsible for the cult role-playing game Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines.
Similar to Bloodlines, Dead State was also very bumpy in terms of development. Personally, I first heard about Dead State from a 2010 Rock Paper Shotgun article. There it was said by the developers that the release probably will not be 2010 anymore.
In 2012, there had been a kickstarter project for Dead State, collecting $ 332,000 for the game, more than double what DoubleBear had been aiming for. Nevertheless, the game was released in December 2014 and in a condition that had brought a lot of bad criticism. At the same time, DoubleBear had added more damage to itself through unprofessional handling of comments.
The fact is that the game was unfinished released. Over the next few months, the game continued to be worked on and patched until the "Reanimated" version of the game appeared in May. I played the game in August 2015 in the completely rugged version of Reanimated Version 2.0.2. According to developers the last version of the game. It could at most once again come a small patch for very critical bugs, if that should be necessary.
And you should keep that in mind during my actual review: Better and more polished than the version I played, it will not be.
After this somewhat longer preface, we now come to the actual game. The basic structure is similar to that of a Jagged Alliance or Xcom, where you are on the one hand, strategic planning, and on the other side clears zone by zone in round-based combat.
When starting the game we can first choose if we want to make the game even more difficult with additional options.
First there is the Ironman Mode, which theoretically should limit the game to daily autosaves. In addition, you can also save when leaving the game. Practically, you can thus continue to save everywhere, which would also lead to much frustration due to some mistakes and bad game mechanics. Ultimately, however, this is an unnecessary option that you could have omitted.
Second, we can choose if our main character, as well as all group members, can be infected by the zombies. Once a character is infected, which happens very quickly in melee combat, if you get more than just minor scratches, then from that point on a pill must be swallowed every day so that the character does not die, which is the end of the game for the main character would mean.
And third, we can choose if all opponents in the game should be strengthened. The degree of difficulty is, however, usually not high with this option, because you can leave all heavier fights outside first, until you can bring appropriate equipment and the necessary skills into the fight. But we will come to the fight later in detail.
After these settings, we can first make the appearance of the character from many purely cosmetic options. Next is the selection of the attributes and abilities we want to have with the main character at the beginning of the game. How they affect exactly in the Kapf, you will learn, however, as some info in the game only in the manual.
Basically, it is the attributes that Strength is important for melee, with Agility increase the action points of the character, with Vigor the hit points and Perception is necessary for the ranged. With the attributes you can increase the corresponding attribute by one with one point.
That's different with the skills. There the increase costs more, the more points you already have in this ability. Particularly interesting here are the so-called Capstones. With a skill value of 3, 6, and 10, you can each choose a special bonus. These are on the one hand bonuses that affect the character itself, such as the 3 Capstone in ranged weapons, where you can choose between more damage to zombies or humans, or bonuses that affect the strategy part of the game, such as one of Choices of the 3er science bonuses, which generate a gallon of fuel a day. These capstones are only available to the main character. All other characters who join you have no special bonuses there. It is also important to remember that the main character in combat missions always has to be taken. The first thing you need to do is build a mechanic that is needed for work in the base, and where you just want to take the capstones for bonuses, so it makes no sense. Leadership and negotiation in turn open up dialogue options that are beneficial to almost every conversation with group members and should be increased as early as possible. In terms of combat skills, it usually comes down to killing muzzled zombies and ranged human rivals. Sooner or later, you will probably be able to increase both abilities. Basically, you do not have to worry about getting scared. You get so many skill points until the end of the game that you can definitely build up 4 and more skills to the max. For all 20 skill points you will get an attribute point, which is a bit less flexible. I will return to that later on how we get these skill points.
The skill system certainly serves its purpose and some of the bonuses you can get are very interesting. The fact that it has a completely different weighting and functionality for its own character than for group members is not so intuitive and also the balancing on the one hand between the skills and on the other hand between the selection possibilities of some capstones leaves much to be desired. Balancing problems, however, are a thing that basically pulls through all the game mechanics.
When we're done with the character creation, we next get an extremely spartan intro, consisting of three similar single frames and three short blocks of text.
There are no more cut-scenes of this or any other kind in the game. And even the end is extremely modest with a small picture and a quatrain.
In the intro we are told briefly that we crash with the plane and the crash site is then also the first scene in the game, which serves as a tutorial. The tutorial explains in text form some of the basics of the game. However, this does not tell you everything, which is partly due to the bad interface to which we also come later.
In addition, the tutorial windows get confused by the actions of the player. So gives us the tutorial text, if you open the window of goals already information about that we should fix the fence. An order that we will receive later in the game. There is also a help that is erroneously displayed twice in a row, and also one or the other typo in the texts. Also a thing that runs through the whole game. Although not to the extent that you will find a typo in every sentence, but to the extent that it leaves a bad impression.
When we get through the tutorial section, we get to our headquarters. A school where we are promptly made a leader by a few other survivors who make all relevant decisions.
On the very first day, you can not do much in the neighborhood. But that changes already on the second day, when we have to decide what each group member should do from 8 o'clock in the morning to 8 o'clock in the evening. For example, a character with a high mechanical value could repair that fence or upgrade a weapon. You could use a doctor as a doctor and so on. However, this also requires appropriate facilities such as a sickroom for the doctor or a workshop for the weapon improvements. These buildings, too, must first be built, and require a certain value in skills, as well as often a particular object that we can find in different places on the world map.
I basically like the idea and the basic concept of upgrading the school further and further to a fully developed headquarters. But again the balancing slides in again. Because you do not build most of the facilities because you need them somehow, but simply because you want everything to be complete. The situation is similar with the jobs on which one can set the characters. Not only do you run out of jobs quickly, you just let a few people sit around; The profit for some jobs is also out of all proportion to other things that you do. For example, the value of 12-hour jobs boosting morale is about the same as the moral gain of 2 of the 100 luxury items you get home with the task force, along with a few other things.
But there is also another elementary part of the game, which takes place almost exclusively in the base. And this is the interaction with the survivors who have joined, and that is likely to account for over 95% of all interactions in the game.
The approximately 40 recruiting companions either stumble past the school at the beginning of a specific day where they can then be picked up, or can be picked up while exploring zones. In the latter case, though, the whole thing reminded me a lot of the scene of the nerd movie "The Gamers", where a new character should be introduced to the group, the master says "I want you to role play this" and then a conversation takes place "Hello, I'm Magellan, a wandering magician, I see your group does not have a wizard". Then one of the group "You look trustworthy, would you like to join our quest"? Whereupon the new character joins the group. Sure, in Dead State it's a bit more decorated. But usually it works the same way. In the fewest cases you have to do something in order to record the character.
Once recorded, the character will be available in the neighborhood and can be used for jobs. The characters all have an individual story, and are also entangled with other characters, which can then lead to certain events. So there is a character who feels harassed by a priest, or a cop who trivializes a petty criminal, whom he knows from pre-apocalypse times. All these interactions between the characters, who usually have a say in the game as a player, have also been pretty good, and the decisions can have a significant impact on the characters.
On the other hand, there are also a number of criticisms regarding the implementation of the companions. For example, as mentioned above, almost everything takes place in the base. It also happens that a character says that he knows an area and would like to join in the exploration, because he knows it there. However, it does not take into account whether you have already explored this area, nor does it make any difference with which character you show up, except for a handful of exceptions, so it is usually disappointing to take the appropriate character with you but then loses no word on the area. Since I would have found it much better if the corresponding zones on the map could not be found by chance and you could not enter without this character, so that the developer could intertwine the story of the zone with the character of the character closely as it was done at Halfway.
Then, as mentioned, there are the interactions between the different characters and often a character also comes to the player and has there a personal concern. So far so good. But there are also three reasons why the Chraktere come to the player, which always run the same.
Either the character says he is ill, whereupon he can be told by negotiation that he can take a day off to cure it.
The character says he does not feel well because he mourns something, then he is told by negotiation that he should rather work as it distracts.
Or the character wants more food, whereupon he is explained to him with leadership, that then the other companions would become angry.
These three points always run exactly the same, which makes the whole thing less exciting and annoying.
It is even more annoying to take care of the personal morality of the characters. Because in addition to the overall moral value for the whole group, each character has an individual status of how happy he is. And that value goes up and down on some decisions you make. Basically, the tendency is always downwards and to counteract this one must get the character special luxury items such as chocolate or cigars, so he is happy again. And that leads to the fact that at the beginning of each day (at the change of the day, by the way, absolutely all the events take place), first look into the moral list, go to the camp and then one after the other survivor abblappert and presses him something to the well-being improve. This turns out to be particularly annoying because there is no clever interface for it. So first you have to note down which character wants to have which items at all and then look for the characters in the not very small school every morning. In any case, a clever interface would have been appropriate here, with which one could press the companion directly by pressing a button on his chocolate. The interface is basically another weakness of the game, which we come back to later as well.
Last but not least, with regard to the companions there are the Crysis events to mention. Every now and then, special decisions are made, for which a meeting with sub-leaders takes place and in which each of the up to 6 companions represents the interests of other companions. For example, it may happen that a theft is discovered, and you now have to decide who the thief is and then decide what to do with him. And now some are the companions for harshly punishing him, while others want to be lenient.
In principle, I found the Crysis Meetings a very nice idea, which, like so much else in the game, was rather half-heartedly implemented. So there is never really a conflict, no matter how you decide and your own opinion is always always implemented, and it costs a maximum of moral points. It's a bit unclear how the mechanics behind it actually work, and just in the two cases where a culprit is being sought, one has to call a character guilty, without having enough information in the approach.
And now we come to the part that most people have probably been waiting for, and that is the core of the game: it's about exploring the zones and the fight.
At the beginning of each day, we can divide up to 4 characters for the task force, which means the main character who must always be there, and 3 other characters.
Next you walk to the blue marker on the edge of the main water board, where you can switch to the region map. There you can either travel on foot, by horse or a car, if you have one, to the next destination. The destinations are initially all hidden, but become visible as soon as they are either mentioned by a companion, or you happen to drive nearby.
Once you have arrived there, you will first want to clear the area.
Fights are turn-based as mentioned above. The fight entry and exit is very badly solved. With the pixelated icon in the middle of the lower screen area and with the space bar you can switch to the round mode. If you initiate the fight yourself, the first move is made with the character you just selected. The problem: If this character does no damage this turn, the game immediately switches back to real-time mode - not until all the chracters have moved once.
In the worst case, it may even be that you attack the zombie, missed, and then use the real-time mode again, only to then switch back to the turn-based mode, where then the zombie may make the first move.
The initiation of the fight with zombies is again particularly badly solved, because one, if one wants to play for security, one Zombie always from the beginning should attack. Why is that so? If you encounter a zombie from the beginning, then the zombie will start the fight himself within a field of view of about 8 fields and consume his action points to the point where he stands in front of the player characters, but can no longer attack. The player is then able to use all of his action points for attacks and nearly destroy the zombie without having a chance to do anything.
On the other hand, if you attack a zombie from behind, the zombie will not start the fight until you have come up to 3-4 spaces, which means he can approach the character and attack once. If you open the fight yourself at the time, this means that you have to approach the zombie with each character before you can attack. That's enough for a few punches on the nearby characters, but since the characters are usually ranked when not manually positioned, the last 2 characters will likely have no way to continue after that to be able to strike. The consequence: The zombie is not dead in the first round and can do exactly what the player does in the other example: Use all his action points for the attack.
Connecting the zombie is not an option in the first 30 hours of play, because there is a volume indicator on the top left. And while melee weapons are so quiet that zombies lure themselves out of hordes without hesitation and just let them gobble up, the shot of a gun is so loud that all zombies become aware of you and run to the player, and even new zombies appear on the map appear.
In itself, the volume is a very nice idea as I think, only one could have made much more from it. Because there is no sneaking or similar in the game. The volume only matters if you either try to knock a door or fight with firearms. Unfortunately, the enemy AI has trouble finding paths to the player. This is not a problem for a few opponents, but if you are somewhere with only one zombie in sight, shoot it, and automatically switch back to real-time mode, the game will freeze depending on the number of zombies on the card, as it is not In order to calculate so many zombies and if you do not hammer fast on the spacebar, you may be surrounded by dozens of zombies in the next picture you see again. Such pathfinding problems, however, have led to a specific pathfinding crash once or twice.
But before we get away from the zombies, let's just say that you can start the fight differently later in the game. I'm so intent on the camouflage vents against zombies, as it shows quite well the unexplained mechanics of the game and you have to make such openings several hundred times in the game.
Once the main character is in close combat and has enough action points, you can use this diagonal to move towards the zombie and then quickly hammer the spacebar. Because by the diagonal movement you put in the game mechanics 2 fields distance back at the same time as long as you are in real-time mode. If you then switch to the round mode during the animation you only have to run 2 more fields and hopefully you can hit the zombie with the remaining points.
Each character has different action points depending on the agility value. The attacking abilities of the characters in Dead State, compared to the release version of Wateland 2, which has offered almost no margin, quite diverse. So you can free, if you have two one-handed weapons, between these back and forth and so, for example, at 7 action points strike once with the weapon that needs 4 points, and once with the, which requires 3 points. But if you only have one weapon that needs 5 points to strike, you can still use the remaining points to move to a position further behind the character to gain better attacking chances. But that's not all, the weapons themselves also offer different attack options. For example, some weapon types have the ability to stun your opponent … forever. Yes, and with that you can probably see that the principle is nice here too, but the balancing is broken even under the weapons and debuffs. While it's cool to have different ways to attack, what good is it for you to add bleeding status to your opponent if he dies anyway this turn. And an attack that makes a zombie permanently incapable of action? This feels more than an exploit than wanted, especially as it allows you to build a protective barrier of opponents who are unable to act. Or rather not, because then the AI would not be clear, which would take forever to move to the next round. So, for the most part, I've used only the standard sentries, with the exception of rapid firearms, which can also fire, if you want to spend more on an action point.
Speaking of firearms: There is no cover system in the game. The hit chance is calculated solely from the character values of shooter and target and the distance. And there are diagonal as mentioned earlier in the game mechanics two spaces distance.
In effect, there are three types of fighting in the game:
Most battles are fights against zombies. These last forever, there is usually no danger whatsoever, and in combination this is extremely wasteful if you have to clear 15 to 30 zombies on a map with melee weapons, as there would be more zombies for firearms.
Then we have a few battles against other survivors, who either bother us with close combat or firearms. These are actually the most interesting fights in the game, and in the first few encounters, where your own weapons and abilities are not yet at their maximum, they can also be a bit crunchy. Later in the game, you will also be barking through such fights as any enemy in sight can be shot down immediately.
And last but not least, we have a few more battles against heavily armored opponents who also throw grenades. There is then again a balancing problem to be found. For grenades can be thrown as far as you can shoot with a rifle. The opponents then throw their grenade at maximum distance on their own characters, which then all about half lose to hit points and get up in the next round first again. Basically a very frustrating experience, which you can overcome especially by reloading or luring your opponents around corners so that they can not throw in their turn and can be shot down by their own people.
By the way, living enemies as well as own characters are not dead when they drop to 0 life, but they are in the knockdown state on the ground. This can be exploited especially for melee opponents, as neither the player nor the opponents can cross over these bodies. Melee opponents must then continue to run or be shot down. It is particularly absurd when you shoot an opponent in a door. This also blocks the path for other protectors in the room behind them and you can walk to the door nicely, shoot at your opponent and back again until all enemies are dead. Exciting fights look different.
However, I had a lot of fun fighting in which several opponent types come together, of which there is a handful in the game. It can then happen that one gang attacks another, causing noise, and attracts zombies, who then join the fight as well. I also find it particularly nice that opponents can also be contaminated by zombies and then stand up again as a zombie after death, which is why you should quickly kill all unconscious enemies after each fight, before the zombies arrive, which are attracted by the noise. Otherwise, the zombies pounce on the conscious opponents and you can fight against those same opponents just again, only that zombies use only melee weapons.
All in all, however, about 3/4 of the time spent in the game is extremely bleak. And then a part of it is either frustrating because of the grenade mechanics or it feels more than a use of stupid AI.
The remaining part of fights that feel good and fun all around is extremely low.
Once the opponents in the zone have been defeated, the looting will begin. In addition one runs then from corpse to corpse, from room to room and puts everything on equipment what one needs, groceries, luxury articles, data carrier, the special Happyness objects like the chocolate and quite rarely also an object, around which a companion with has requested a fetch quest, such as the CD Collection of a Djs or Gittaren String of a Musician. Especially exciting is the whole running around and plundering but not synonymous, because there is almost nothing, which is really special.
Packed full, you make it back home then, where then also luxury items and food converted and attributed to the camp.
And that's also the way to get new skill points. Because you do not get that through experience, which does not even exist in the game. Rather, bringing X items of food or luxury items home, giving away special items like chocolate, or cracking found disks.
The disks are laptops found in the zones and the like, which are then cracked using a special hacking program available after a few game days.
This is a mini-game in which a password is searched for, whose length and the letters used and the positions of a few of them are given.
If the password is cracked, then there is a message to read, such as a traveler's recent messages before the apocalypse, research reports, internet conversations and so on. These are sometimes a few sentences, but partially gauze text walls.
The hacking is basically a rather primitive mini-game, but I felt it at first as a nice change. But this eventually stops when you have already cracked more than 50 of these passwords, and secondly, the passwords have become so heavy that they have a length of 8 or 9 characters and some are even written in Leetspeek.
And there are as many as 150 such passwords and texts, which in my opinion can be described as a complete overkill. At some point it is just too much.
I have already mentioned that the interface is not necessarily the crowning glory. Although it's not necessarily the worst that you've ever seen in a game, but it often acts like a patchwork in which someone has always come up with the idea that you need an ad for this and that, which then directly it reflects that parts of the interface are not intuitive, and other parts are simply missing.
One thing missing, for example, would be an ad in the looter window for how much a character can carry. If you are in the interface to put an item from a cupboard in his inventory, you will only see how much the character already carries. Not how much space he has left. You would have to leave the window and look in the inventory of the character.
The main character thus has up to 4 abilities with which he can buff the group at short notice. After all, you can look up in the character window.
However, which affects weakening that you have placed on the opponents, or have received your own characters … there is only the handle to the manual.
One of the abilities that you can actively act on is choosing a goal, which is almost invisible to the player. The same applies to one of the few jobs where you should bring a character to a particular zone. There you have to interact with an object and the only indication is that the cursor is white instead of black. A mechanism that was almost never used before. Instead, one is used to the fact that the cursor becomes a hand when using or otherwise changes the shape.
Completely cumbersome is the inventory management in the base. This question keeps cropping up in the forum, and there has even been an article on the game on Rock Paper Shotgun that the columnist was unaware that such an option even exists.
And you do not have to open the inventory but go to the storeroom and click on the top left on your name to open a drop down menu. There you can then pick out the name of the companion, which quickly becomes confusing with 20, 30 companions, and so can switch to the inventory. Dragging and dropping from one character directly to another is not possible, which also makes changing crews a bit annoying.
Then we have the overview of the morale of the individual group members, which can be found in the window for the goals. This list can be sorted, but the sorting is not saved, so that at the beginning of each day, if you abklappert the characters to give them the chocolate, every time you have to re-sort, if you have not directly memorized all the characters.
Even more hidden than the inventory are the attributes and skills of the companions. Just as one does not get to the inventory of the companions via the inventory, one does not get to the character values of the companions over the character values. It also helps to click on next and last character nothing.
The skills can also be seen on the job board, but to get at the attributes you first have to go to the target window, select a character, and in this specific case the arrows below are not for the last and next character, but for which values should be displayed. And of course, not the last shot will be saved there either.
As mentioned, there are certainly games with even worse interfaces, but the interface of Dead State is still deficient.
The same applies to the performance of the game. As already mentioned, the game freezes when it is overwhelmed with the calculation of the AI. But there are also areas where you have built another level, so another floor. Not only does the game mechanics work catastrophically, because the AI has problems switching between the levels and changing your own game characters is at best bumpy, the game probably does not calculate these levels liquid due to the large number of objects ,
Although the computer on which I played Dead State has meanwhile gotten into the years, but performance problems can also be noticed on faster PCs.
In addition, there are errors, such as several opponents in real time also like to run on the same field, and a few crashes, but so far are rather rare, as long as you do not take Ryan as a companion in the insert, which crashing the game repeatedly ,
You should already have heard from my descriptions of the individual components of the game, as it is about the balancing and the game flow. Neither are the game components themselves reasonably balanced, nor is this the case in their interaction.
The game has a fixed end time of about a week. Even if there are already extremely many zones, so you have these, if you hurry at the latest after half of the season through. It is not even necessary to explore everything, because you have already arrived at a point where you already have everything. From that point on you have to click through one day after the other and take care of the dialogues in order to reach the end of the game. And just this clicking through and taking care of the characters with gifts takes a total of 5-10 hours of playtime. Playing time that only seems to be wasted. As mentioned before, the buildings are not really important, but you build them for the sake of completeness.
1845/5000
But even with that, you're done with about a third of the imposed game time. The tasks in the base are for the most part comparatively useless and there are not enough available to make sense of the entire workforce. Thus, the balancing can be described as a complete catastrophe only from front to back, from the fight to the base management.
And so my conclusion for the game is not good. In other games, one can say that this or that element is not particularly successful, or that the interaction of the individual game elements hooks here and there.
In the case of Dead State, however, neither the individual elements nor their interaction work well. This is particularly fatal in combat, which is the core of the game, but only in very few cases actually fun. The game is pervaded by minor bugs, poor game mechanics, and poor balancing.
The game has in itself a nice concept, lots of good lyrics and certainly also the assets, especially models and graphics, just as you would have wished for a new Jagged Alliance. Only these were not incorporated in a good big whole, which is a pity especially because you can see the potential, but at the same time know that this potential will never be achieved, as changes to the game are no longer provided.
From me there is therefore only a thumbs up half way down.
Since the game does not really shine in any of the game elements, unfortunately, there is no group of players to whom I would recommend the game.