The original Dead State was released at the very end of 2014 and went completely unnoticed by the general public. However, perhaps it’s for the better - despite many interesting ideas, a non-standard approach to gameplay and atmosphere, the game turned out to be frankly crude. Neither a successful Kickstarter campaign, nor a rather long stay in Steam Early Access, nor close work with the community helped. And there were more than enough competitors back then - on the one hand, the consonant Wastelands 2, on the other, the absolutely magnificent Divinity: Original Sin. The authors tried to take into account all the shortcomings, looked at the disappointing sales results and began a global work on bugs. Dead State: Reanimated is not a new game, but a very tangible remake of what we could see almost a year ago, an attempt to correct all the shortcomings and offer a solid portion of new content. Well, this is an excellent reason to write a review of the game - perhaps, previously unnoticed, it will become a pleasant surprise this time. Let's see if DoubleBear Productions managed to polish their project?

Horrible in person

The main problem of Dead State: Reanimated has not gone away in a year - it's the engine. It is primitive, it produces a picture of terrible quality, poor models and lousy animations. Nothing could be done about this (although, it would seem, Unreal Engine 4 has long since become practically free), but the authors have done a titanic job of catching “bugs.” If the original Dead State tried to crash to the desktop with literally every sneeze, then Dead State: Reanimated shows stable performance. The game has learned to support various nice effects such as anti-aliasing, various modern resolutions, and so on. This did not affect the overall picture at all.

With visual content, things have become somewhat better than before. Now the locations do not consist of frankly identical fragments, they are elaborated and look interesting. A lot of work was done with the interiors, which certainly added to the atmosphere of Dead State: Reanimated. But the models still look angular, the characters resemble dolls carved from a single piece of wood with an ax and controlled by an inept puppeteer. There is nothing to be done here - the authors initially made a mistake with the choice of engine and are now paying for it with a terrible picture. But for an RPG, the picture is far from the most important thing. How is Dead State: Reanimated doing with everything else?

Personnel decides everything

The essence of the game has also not changed. The protagonist comes to his senses after a terrible crash - a plane flying to the Caribbean crashed somewhere in Central Texas. This is already unpleasant, but the situation is aggravated by the fact that a zombie apocalypse is raging around, aggressive looters and bandits are roaming around, and supplies have to be obtained in brutal battles. The state died, giving you the opportunity to save yourself. The hero will have to lead a community of survivors and lead them to a bright future - or to an inglorious death in the stomachs of the undead (or from the bullets of bandits, there are a lot of options here).

The core idea of ​​Dead State: Reanimated is great. Managing a small community of survivors, rapid forays for resources, raids on “dead” cities, searches for medicine, food and equipment, relationships between the inhabitants of the Vault - all this opens up enormous scope for creativity. The game offers a huge number of different situations, which have to be solved thoughtfully - and the consequences of these decisions can “resurface” after a long time, with completely unexpected results. The shelter grows, acquires utility rooms and a full-fledged line of defense, during raids you find other survivors (or they come to you themselves), but at the same time the tangle of personal relationships, intrigues, “battles of authority” and other sweet joys of a social manipulator grows. By the way, you won’t be allowed to make the most important decisions single-handedly - for this purpose, a Council will gather from the most authoritative personalities of your settlement, and in order to convince the others, you will have to try. Here you need either excellent diplomacy, or charisma, or established relationships (appeasing your opponents with gifts will help to establish them) - in the most extreme case, you can take the unwanted authority with you on a raid and shoot him away from human eyes. True, this may backfire later - rumors will spread, morale will drop, people will fill their heads with problems and everything will fall into the abyss.

Initially ensuring the functioning of the Vault is only a quarter of the battle. Another quarter is about relationships between survivors. The remaining two quarters will consist of the plot and travel between locations - in the original, the last point was routine, but Dead State: Reanimated took into account the mistakes, making random encounters on the global map more unexpected, tweaking the AI ​​settings of opponents and increasing the complexity of battles. The forays now make sense - there is now less junk in the locations, and the construction and improvement of the Vault began to require not only resources, but also “special ingredients”. In addition, there are some locations where survivors ask you to go—sometimes for public benefit, sometimes for their own benefit.

Happened?

It would seem that the main “jambs” of the original Dead State: Reanimated have been corrected. Is everything really good now, except for the terrible picture? No. All work is derailed by two things - tedious microcontrol of tasks in the Vault and a disgusting interface. One example. In order to screw a silencer onto a pistol, it is not enough just to find a pistol and a silencer. You need to find a pistol and take it to the Vault warehouse. After that, take it back to your inventory, then go to the special board, select a mechanic who will screw the silencer onto the gun. Skip some time, and then go on your own to get a pistol to the warehouse. Even if you screwed on the suppressor yourself, the gun will still appear in stock. There are many such examples. They attack the game with a friendly crowd and do not give it any chance.

The interface puts the final nail in the coffin. He is terrible, clumsy and uninformative. Starting from organizing inventory to interaction between group members. Even the simplest command will require at least 4-5 mouse clicks. Add to this the training, designed in such a way that you want to skip it as quickly as possible - and you get a high barrier to entry and boredom.

It would seem like two small little things, but they destroy the positive impression of Dead State: Reanimated. The most annoying thing is that these two problems migrated from the original and the developers were repeatedly told about them.

Bottom line

An excellent attempt to correct its own mistakes and allow the game to take its rightful place among RPGs. Improved AI, a lot of work with locations, bringing to mind the elements of the main “feature” of the game, an absolutely gorgeous atmosphere. If the developers had tried and fixed two “small problems”, Dead State: Reanimated would have become a hit. Is it really that hard to hire a good UI designer and rework the task system in the Vault? But the problems have not gone away, and this prevents Dead State: Reanimated from becoming a truly worthwhile game.

The theme of zombies is worn out like old jeans. The concept of “save yourself from the living dead” is so popular that nowadays you can read about zombies, watch about zombies, play zombies. Or become a zombie if you are taking the winter session. And if you haven’t closed the summer one yet, then you would fit perfectly into the Dead State game. Guess who.

A man is a wolf to a man, and a zombie a zombie is a zombie

What about talking?

Harsh tediousness

Regarding the battle: when you move along the map to the chosen goal, and along the way you have to deal with some lost random enemies in a step-by-step mode, this is only distracting and annoying. The dynamics are lost, but this is the most important thing in the game. We can be bored even without a game, but with a game it should be fun and interesting.

Verdict

The zombie apocalypse predicted hundreds of times has finally arrived. Naturally, humanity was not prepared for the fact that clumsy and slow, but terribly disgusting undead would begin to roam the streets. The vast majority of the planet's inhabitants immediately became victims of rampant zombies, while the survivors huddled in small groups and are now trying with all their might to prolong their stay in this world.

To be completely honest, the zombies in Dead State are not particularly intelligent or particularly active. Looking at them, it’s hard to believe that a huge number of people were eaten. However, this is a misleading impression. Although the most common high fences that surround human settlements are used to protect against the undead, they continue to pose a huge danger.

An overview and walkthrough of the game Dead State can be seen in this video:

Dangers all around

Even in the face of a common zombie danger, not all surviving people agreed to unite. Under conditions of any deficiency, the worst human qualities emerge. Therefore, it is not surprising that in the struggle for food, which is sorely in short supply, many behave worse than zombies. Law-abiding citizens end up in double jeopardy. The living dead scour the fence in search of fresh meat, and crime is rampant in the settlement.

Getting food is not the only goal of the game. The hero will have to look for other survivors behind the fence, deliver them to a safe place, replenishing his team. In addition, the settlement requires constant improvement and strengthening. A small gap in a fence can easily cause big trouble.

This browser-based project grew out of the VKontakte application, which is a turn-based strategy game. The Legion of the Dead game turned out to be so exciting and multifaceted that its game world has outgrown the boundaries of a regular application.

Review of the new epic shooter Call of duty Avanced Warfare. The gameplay and graphics are breathtaking!

The apocalypse has arrived, but life goes on

In this game you won’t find crazy drive and you won’t even destroy the undead in batches. After all, if the zombie apocalypse really comes, not everyone will go to the front lines to fight the undead. Someone will have to do more mundane things:

• Decide how to feed the camp residents.
• Deal with drinking water.
• Turn on the heating for winter.
• Fight against robbers and marauders.

A wrong decision here is punished very harshly. Residents are at the limit of their capabilities, their emotional state is unstable, and their psyche is shaken. In such conditions, any dissatisfaction instantly develops into a real rebellion. It will be very difficult to cope with angry comrades in misfortune, so there is a high probability of finding yourself on the other side of the fence without a weapon.

It’s not easy to exterminate your inner Plyushkin, who drags home whatever he finds. In games, satisfying the collecting instinct is usually the prerogative of RPGs. But with the development of the “survival” genre, Plyushkin discovered a new and truly amazing world for himself. A world after a global catastrophe, where every thing is very bad.

Combines the approaches of both worlds and something else in addition. This is a survival game, and a bit of a role-playing game, and turn-based tactics, and a specific strategy based on the distribution of resources.

Bang bang - and we're dead

You spend the lion's share of your time on forays. At such moments Dead State very reminiscent of that same semi-mythical one: a chamber at the height of a lamppost and strictly one-story buildings filled with containers, cabinets and other promising furniture.

It looks bleak: gray city landscapes, along which figures of people and very crude zombies walk. Although appearance is the tenth thing. Each location, be it the business center of a small town or a rural grocery store, is literally packed with values. Finding and dragging them away is not a whim, but an urgent need. Unfortunately, there could be zombies lurking around every corner, for example. Or looters who never fail.

The mode of meeting the enemy depends only on your actions. You didn’t run headlong, but carefully made your way along the wall? This means that they ignored you and will be unpleasantly surprised. The characters' fields of view are calculated quite honestly, and noise is no less important. The latter primarily concerns weapons: a combat knife cuts the throat without breaking the ringing silence; The sledgehammer, of course, attracts a little attention, especially during a blow to the head. The shot is an obvious signal to all locals: trouble is coming.

There is no such thing that is not worth pocketing. Except for rotten apples and dead rats, of course. We will leave them for a rainy day.

The team cheerfully burst into the tent camp and began to destroy it...	...but someone came to ruin earlier. What to do! They hit - run.

Unobvious and unusual strategies arise from this. Methodically killing zombies one at a time is one of them; We take the most powerful partner with an ax, quietly place him behind the walker’s back, and turn on the turn-based combat mode. A blow - and the corpse collapses lushly to the ground. It is advisable that the brothers of the deceased do not hang around nearby - that is, within a radius of three to five cells. Zombies are completely deaf and can see not much further than the flight distance of vomit.

However, loud sounds are a guarantee of local carnage. When you meet marauders (and you will meet them), the shootout starts easily and naturally. The very first shot will call all the zombies from the location. After a few turns, you will find that you and your enemies are surrounded. Virtuosos of hit'n'run tactics can provoke the bandits to fire and run away, leaving them to shoot the dead. And then run away from the doubled army of zombies.

The guys are stuck. The marauders were surrounded by a flock of zombies. We can go around the landfill and escape, or we can wait for the outcome and finish off the survivors.

Don't try to break down the door if there might be dead people hanging around. They will hear, come running and bite off your arms and legs.	There are so many shelves, but only half a dozen of them are active. However, even in this situation, your pockets will be full.

Despite interesting flirtations with the visibility and noise system, the battles turned out to be poor. The shooting position is only to stand proudly in the middle of the parking lot. The firearm has a tear-jerkingly small radius of destruction, so it’s easier to take out the sharpening, run up and make a hole. Almost the same cruel random number generator reigns as in the last one: the guy with the board missed twice in a row, even though he had developed the skill of melee weapons all the way. The AI ​​is primitive: zombies, with proper skill, are exterminated one at a time. The bandits have one tactic - run closer, shoot, shoot.

There are only two pleasant moments in such battles: when the dead and marauders fight without us and when it’s time to loot ourselves.

Life of Soplezhuev

And now comes the long-awaited moment of returning to his native lair. In fact, it is an abandoned school building, surrounded by a makeshift fence and turned into an outpost.

Different people live within these walls with you. Really different - during numerous crises, verbal skirmishes and conflicts, you will understand what kind of nervous rabble has fallen under your care. The type who hates to sit under a roof - you can promise him that you will take him with you on outings more often. A girl veterinarian who is annoyingly cared for by her mother. A police officer who tolerates your leadership for very flimsy reasons. A harmful system administrator who was preparing for a zombie apocalypse, and now he was pushed aside and was not allowed to rule over the survivors (no one has yet thought of such a subtle irony).

Almost every day these idiots will break down, swear and threaten to escape. The right cues will help keep them in line, the wrong ones are a shortcut into a loop (no joke). Some hysterics happen according to the script (the plot, by the way, is extremely adequate). Others - because you did not keep track of the fighting spirit. Each survivor's condition varies and constantly tends towards depression.

How to help? Rare gifts and raising the general mood in the team. What is depressing is that almost from the very first day it is collapsing into a deep minus. Every day we are forced to fight for any unit of mood and balance on the brink. Is the generator cut out? Please, -50 as it never happened. Tones - no words.

The car can be reassembled. And burn all the precious fuel in search of a new dose of fuel. Pure drug addiction!

Dissatisfied characters will ruin the mood of the entire team. The sad ones get joy, the alarmists get a bullet.	BioWare will also envy the choice of replicas. Sending erotic things on foot is allowed as often as the logic of the narrative allows. No “Okay” or “Okay, come with us.”

Discipline is maintained by several factors. Having food only keeps the bar from falling, but rich loot is good for the mind. The rest is pure convenience: a working toilet, electricity, a well, a watchtower, strong fortifications, many, many different structures. A very rich selection, where each item requires a certain set of resources and skills (both you and your companions have).

And this joy should be maintained. Early in the morning, a schedule is drawn on a special board: Reni will do the cleaning (+1 to morale), Joel will keep watch (another +1), Davis will go to the greenhouse (the food will grow on its own! Hurray!), and we will go at the head of the Sonderkommando of four klutzes clean out cash registers, warehouses and even houses. The distribution of labor is perhaps the most interesting thing in Dead State.

* * *

Dead State did a good job with the zombie theme. Actually, the deathly atmosphere here is no good, and you just want to skip the battles. What warms the soul much more is the provision of shelter, the fight against growing discontent, and far-reaching planning, completely dependent on the success of the next campaign.

“Sandbox” games about survival and resource collection are multiplying in such numbers today that it’s time for us, the players, to think about what, in the middle of this bacchanalia, where the developers, like zombies, are surrounded on all sides, stretching out their hands and wheezing: “ Play... survival... alone among enemies..." Dead State was conceived and announced long before the start of this mass hysteria - in . Therefore, the game differs in many ways from the host of monotonous projects on this topic. In some places it looks like an interesting mixture of Fort Zombie and Fallout. A - to a boring simulator of searching for toilet paper and chocolate bars...

The game looks, to put it mildly, not impressive...

Back to school

In concept, Dead State is more playable. Miraculously surviving a plane crash, the main character falls from the frying pan into the fire: he comes to his senses in a Texas school surrounded by zombies. a handful of people experiencing severe resource shortages. Therefore, we will make dangerous forays outside the school in search of food for survivors, fuel for generators and spare parts for repairs and “upgrades” of the shelter.

Most of the work involved repairing the refrigerator, the fence, which periodically sags under the pressure of zombies, and the generator that supplies the school with electricity. But there are plenty of options for improvement. You can build a chicken coop, make a front garden on the roof for growing seeds, open a shooting range at the school (temporarily increases the accuracy of the characters), a scientific laboratory, a garage, a hospital (speeds up the recovery of the wounded), a workshop for making weapons, equipment and other extremely useful things in the household.

More precisely, it will not be you who will build, but the characters you have assigned. It is clear that the main character soon takes on the role of leader - it is he who determines who will go with him on the next foray in search of resources, who will repair the fence, who will make Molotov cocktails in the workshop or build an observation tower... and who will wash the floors.

All of this, even mop exercises, affects survivors. If at the end of the day the school has enough food, antibiotics (they allow even zombies to slowly but surely cure people) and other important resources, if the generators are working, the fence is repaired, and the floors are clean, then the overall morale in the shelter will increase. If everything is the other way around, it will fall.

In addition, there is also such a thing as the personal mood of each character. If he is happy and satisfied with everything, this has a positive effect on others. You can cheer up by fulfilling personal requests and giving the hero a gift, such as batteries, perfume, a chocolate bar, and so on.

Most people you meet outside of school can only be fought.

Zombie Specialist

It would seem, what does Fallout have to do with it? The fact is that Dead State was invented and created (together with his charges from DoubleBear Production) by Brian Mitsoda, a game designer and screenwriter who once worked in studios such as Black Isle, Troika Games and Obsidian Entertainment. It is his pen that accounts for many of the most colorful images and dialogues in the cult Vampire: - Bloodlines. Such a person, naturally, is not just a story about finding resources and building.

Therefore, Dead State, first of all, has an advanced role-playing system based on parameters and “perks”. At the start, you not only generate your hero, determining his gender and appearance, but also set his specialization - he will be a mechanic, a qualified doctor, an excellent shooter or a bull, effectively wielding an ax and a club in close combat. All this must be taken into account when distributing responsibilities among the survivors in the shelter. It is understandable that it would be advisable to employ those who have better developed skills for repairs and construction - they will do everything faster. Those who are good at medicine are better off working in a hospital. The “nerds” go to the scientific laboratory, and those who love to hit, destroy and shoot should be taken with them on forays into the city infested with the dead.

By the way, you don’t give experience here for killing zombies - and rightly so. They reward us for important conditions - fixing the same fence, providing food for a week, and so on. At a certain level of each skill, you can take some kind of “perk” that gives certain passive bonuses, such as an increase in the chance of critical damage or the speed of healing in battle. All characters initially have their own set of such “perks”, and this also needs to be taken into account when determining who, where and with whom. For example, one girl really exudes joy when she works in a hospital - it’s better to send her there.