State of Decay: Year-One Survival Edition collects the base State of Decay game from 2013 as well as its two major add-ons (the infinite sandbox Breakdown and the story-driven Lifeline), and updates it for the Xbox One and PC (for those who didn't already own the game for the latter).

Intelligent play is not nearly as interesting as life on the edge of total annihilation. But for each moment of spontaneous, unscripted story wonder that State of Decay generates, it is also one glitch, bug, or broken feature away from drawing you completely out of its experience. State of Decay wants to be many games-chief among them the first video game to properly capture the community survival elements of a Dawn of the Dead film in mechanical terms (as opposed to the narrative terms of Telltale's The Walking Dead)-and, at its best moments, it creates a sense of community, tension, and character agency matched by few of its peers.

Whenever I attempt to describe State of Decay to people who have never played the game, I find myself describing the game I want State of Decay to be-and the game that Undead Labs attempted to craft-more than the game that State of Decay actually is. I chased him in his aimless sprint across the decaying but once vibrant Trumbull Valley-killing hordes of zombies to protect him-until, twenty minutes later, I realized that I'd encountered another of State of Decay's game-breaking bugs, and I had to reload my save and start anew. But when we arrived at the home, he fled. How many suburban daydreams had died since the outbreak? He could die with dignity here. We drove to a home in what had been the pristine town of Marshall. We couldn't risk it we'd sacrificed so much to get there.

He was sick, and he was going to die, but he couldn't do it at our new home.

We all had that-we knew that we were ticking zombie time bombs.

State of decay: year-one survival edition