State of Decay

A genuinely influential zombie survival RPG

State of Decay's pitch — "life as you knew it has gone to hell after the mother of all zombie outbreaks. Now you and the few scattered survivors must band together to survive and rebuild" — undersold, even at launch, how much genuine systemic depth sat underneath a fairly familiar premise. The official screenshot shows the tone directly: an ordinary suburban street, a small-town antique shop's awning visible in the background, a lone survivor sprinting from a slow-moving horde past brick storefronts that look more like a real, unremarkable town than a stylised horror set piece. That mundane, Pacific Northwest setting, combined with permadeath character management and real community-scale base building, was genuinely ahead of most of the genre in 2013, and its influence is directly visible in State of Decay 2 and much of the survival genre that followed. Reviewers across the game's history consistently credit the weight of losing a favourite survivor to permadeath as something few other games in the genre have matched.

A controversy this review can document in full

What complicates any simple recommendation of the original release is a specific, well-documented history that dominates more than half of this game's negative review sample. "Negative review since the devs stopped providing patches and require you to buy the new version if you want to keep getting patches and bugfixes. Owners of the original game get no discount whatsoever," reads a 2017 review, describing a pattern independently confirmed across years of other reviews. "I feel betrayed. I supported the developer by buying the game in early access. I waited months for major patches that would fix the numerous bugs. Now I am told I must fork over another $30 for a remaster," reads a 2015 review. A 2016 review frames the core objection precisely: "Apparently, it is OK to charge $30 for an update. Well, here is my reply. How about no." This pattern — original owners left with an unpatched, buggy release while a fixed version was sold separately as new content — recurs independently and specifically across at least a dozen reviews spanning several years, describing the same grievance in almost identical terms each time.

A resolution this review can also document

Unlike most of the abandoned or contested games covered elsewhere in this outlet's history, this specific controversy has a real, verifiable ending. A news post from Undead Labs dated 26 November 2019, posted directly to the game's own Steam feed, states plainly: "In celebration [of returning to Steam with State of Decay 2], and as a 'Thank You!' to our loyal Steam players who have patiently awaited this news, all owners of the original State of Decay game are receiving one complimentary copy of the remastered Year-One Survival Edition," delivered automatically to Steam inventories, "including all DLC," and described as "yours to redeem and play forever." That's a concrete, checkable remedy to years of specific, well-founded reviewer anger — not a vague apology or a discount code, but the actual disputed product handed over for free to everyone who'd bought the original. Anyone reading this review who already owns State of Decay on Steam should check their own library and inventory for that gift before buying anything else related to this game.

What that means for judging the original release today

Given that resolution, the practical question this review has to answer is slightly unusual: is the original, unremastered 2013 release worth reviewing and playing on its own terms today, given a free, superior alternative almost certainly already exists for most owners? The answer is that the original's design ideas remain sound and historically important regardless of which specific build a player experiences them through, but there's no real reason to choose the original build over Year- One Survival Edition if both are available — the remaster exists specifically to fix the bugs and performance issues the negative review sample documents in detail. One isolated 2016 review separately alleges the developer was actively deleting critical reviews during the height of the controversy; this review found no independent corroboration of that specific claim elsewhere in its research and reports it as an unverified, single account rather than an established pattern.

Why a four-year gap doesn't erase the original harm

It's worth resisting the temptation to treat the 2019 resolution as fully closing the book on this episode, even though this review credits it as genuine and concrete. Four years is a long time for a game's most invested players to have already moved on, uninstalled, or simply concluded the developer couldn't be trusted — the damage to goodwill during that gap was real and happened regardless of what came afterward. Several of the most detailed negative reviews cited above were written in 2015 through 2017, meaning the reviewers who felt "betrayed" or accused the company of running "a cashgrab" had already formed and published that judgment years before any remedy arrived, with no guarantee at the time that one ever would. A late fix is genuinely better than no fix, and this review credits Undead Labs for eventually providing one rather than simply letting the original release rot indefinitely. But it doesn't retroactively make the original wait reasonable, and a review that only mentioned the 2019 resolution without dwelling on the years that preceded it would be telling a tidier story than the one this game's own review history actually supports.

Final verdict

State of Decay's core design — permadeath survivors, community base management, an unglamorous zombie-outbreak setting — remains genuinely influential and worth recognising on those terms. The years-long dispute over Year-One Survival Edition was a real, well-documented failure of how Undead Labs treated its original supporters, and this review doesn't minimise that. But it's also a rare case in this outlet's coverage of legacy games where the story has an actual, concrete, verifiable resolution: everyone affected was eventually made whole with the exact product they'd been asking for, at no additional cost. That combination — real historical harm, honestly documented, and a real resolution, also honestly documented — is the fairest way this review can score a game whose most important context isn't really about the game files themselves anymore.