It’s fairly simple, but there’s certainly a sense of satisfaction from bringing back a truck-full of rucksacks filled with resources. From then on, you will largely rinse repeat the process of scavenging for crafting materials and resources, upgrading your community’s base, and hunting down the multiple Plague Hearts scattered across the map. You’re taught most of State of Decay 2’s mechanics in its opening tutorial, which sees you picking your starting characters before going off scavenging and setting up your first home base. You’ll occasionally get a personal mission for one of your survivors to embark on that provide a little bit of extra context to the world, but it’s all fairly barebones and more just a reason to have you do something outside of its scavenging gameplay loop.
That’s about it in terms of a story, with your characters having fairly vague backgrounds outside of their previous occupations and traits. Players are dropped into a zombie apocalypse and must scavenge for materials, weapons, and other survivors in order to build a community and destroy the Plague Hearts that have caused the undead invasion. State of Decay 2 feels very familiar to its Xbox Arcade smash-hit predecessor. This moment pretty much sums up my time with State of Decay 2 – an engaging survival experience with some seriously glaring performance issues. The horizon is littered with the mangled bodies of the undead, and as the sun sets, a zombie falls from the heavens right in front of my car. Having looted a nearby neighborhood, my vehicle loaded up with rucksacks of supplies and crafting materials, I slam the trunk down, fill the tank with the fuel I brought along with me, and hop into the driver’s seat.