State of Decay is a vast and complex game full of systems and things to do. I feel like the game is too open and maybe a bit too complex, leaving you with a short list of actions you can take and a ton of systems to observe and care about as some kind of real-time clock decays the world around you - I think?
You control some dude at the beginning of the story and while your stats might go up if your character dies, he's dead forever, and you switch to another character that might have worst stats - kinda forcing you to play a little with everyone instead of just having one dude and some kind of 'game over' screen when he dies. The game isn't that hard at first and playing carefully seems like the way to go. You can dispatch most enemies with your melee weapons - although they break, and switching them on the fly is quite tough - and firearms. Or you can ram into them with a car, that works too. I'm not sure if I like this middle ground between really tough enemies and having to be super careful and arcade-ish zombie murder simulator.
This game is full of nice systems taken individually. You can get on high ground and search around the environment to fill your map with objectives to go to - scavenging items that you can then bring back to a safe house to upgrade it or gain influence. I haven't played enough to unlock everything, but from where I was when I grew bored of this game, I didn't enjoy how things worked, it's fine to have me search and loot containers in houses and tents, but I kinda wish I just gained resources by doing so, the whole "community" system is also too quickly introduced without enough explanation for me to know what I should do.
You have a base with people in it, and morale, and resources, you can construct your base to unlock upgrades and you can go up in influence, allowing you to bring more NPCs with you in expeditions. There is also an upkeep in food and ammo every day - real-time day? I can't tell. And some events seem to have happened while I wasn't playing? Maybe the game should've told me about that? How do I prevent these bad things from happening? Complete side-quests before I quit the game? How about you tell me that? Should I focus more on the main quest or just randomly explore houses to collect bags full of things to bring back to my base to upgrade it?
There's nothing wrong with State of Decay, but it didn't grab me. Maybe if it was more focused, maybe if I had a list of missions with choices like "GO GATHER TEN AMMO POUCHES" and "KILL TWO ZOMBIE HORDES" and rewarded me with influence and the option to upgrade my safehouse when I had enough material and stuff, maybe that would've grabbed me more. I love plenty of things about it, I love how your stats would go up depending on what you did, I love the map/search system, but the weird multi-character thing and the general sense of aimlessness made me drop my attention quickly off this game.