The zombie survival game Dead State was decent enough for Evan to choose it as his "personal pick" for 2014. But it clearly could've stood a little extra work and fine tuning, too. As he said in his review, it was "somewhat blandly presented and burdened by bugs." So DoubleBear Productions went ahead and did just that for an updated version called Dead State: Reanimated.

Dead State: Reanimated features major changes to combat systems and balance, as well as new AI behaviors for human enemies, enabling them to notice your presence more quickly and react to it more effectively. The new "PC Infection" option means your own character can, optionally, be infected as easily as any of your allies, and there's also a new Hardcore mode with more dangerous combat, increased resource consumption, slower healing, and lower morale. Reanimated also offers new areas to explore, plus new random encounters, combat sounds, animations, and even alarms in building that will attract all sorts of unwanted attention if they're tripped.

Things have been improved under the hood as well. "We ve rooted out every crash and progress blocking bug to make sure you have the smoothest possible experience. Several popularly requested usability improvements have been added, such as friendly fire confirmation, looting piled up bodies, and an option to toggle Live Shelter movement on and off," the studio wrote. "Both allies and the undead have received major pathfinding adjustments that will reduce lag some people have experienced as well as make movement more consistent and natural."

Dead State: Reanimated is live now, and will be a free update for anyone who already owns the game. A full list of changes is posted on Steam.

Dead State was plagued by a number of technical issues when it came out last year, but even so it was good enough to make Evan Lahti's "Personal Pick" for 2014. And now you can try it yourself, without spending a dime: Developer Double Bear Productions has released a free demo that offers roughly ten hours of play over the first seven days of the game. 

The Dead State demo includes 15 survivors who can join your shelter, 18 unique locations to explore, and interactions with factions including looters, survivalists, and the Coyotes, a fearsome motorcycle gang. You'll have to deal with all the same problems that come up in the full game, from practical matters like finding food and reinforcing your shelter, to dicier issues such as resolving conflicts between your fellow survivors and deciding which outsiders can be trusted.

The demo covers just the first seven days of play, but saves can be carried over into the full version if you decide to pick it up. Speaking of which, the fifth patch is also now live, which among other things adds loading screen images and tips, adjusts weapon balance, tweaks dialog, and fixes a number of bugs. A breakdown of the latest Dead State update is here, while the 1GB demo can be downloaded from the Dead State Steam page.

Peter "Durante" Thoman is the creator of PC downsampling tool GeDoSaTo and the modder behind Dark Soul's DSfix. He's previously analyzed the PC ports of Dark Souls II and Valkyria Chronicles for PC Gamer. Today, he's celebrating his favorite genre.

I like to imagine that when historians of the medium of gaming look back on 2014, they will see it not as the year of half-baked AAA games, not as the time when microtransaction profits surged further ahead, but rather as the first year of the CRPG renaissance.

Asking a fan of the CRPG genre—that is, old-school computer RPGs—about when it reached its peak, you ll likely get a large range of answers, from the late 80s up until the turn of the century. What you won t hear is any year from, say, 2004 to 2013. While the genre has not died entirely over the past decade, it was kept alive on a sparse diet of shoestring-budget indie titles, and the very rare larger highlight, such as 2007 s Mask of the Betrayer.

All of this changed in 2014, and it s not looking to stop any time soon. Even genre aficionados might have had trouble keeping up with the deluge of great games throughout the year—these are generally not short games—and it seems all but impossible for the casual fan. As such, I want to close out the year by providing a quick look at each of my personal highlights, and an even quicker overview of some other worthy candidates.

Might & Magic X: Legacy

In a year filled with amazing games in my favorite genre, it s hard to select a single one to stand above the rest. However, if I had to choose, it would come down to Might & Magic X: Legacy. As a grid-based open-world turn-based first person party RPG, it s a representative of what might be the rarest RPG subgenre of them all. Certainly, this is not a choice I d have ever expected to make at the start of the year, but M&MX is the complete package. It combines rewarding exploration and dungeon crawling with great character development and combat systems, and had me glued to my screen throughout its entire duration.

I am still amazed by the fact that this game was even made, and in the shape of a true old-school sequel and not an ill-advised attempt at rebooting the franchise. As you might be aware, Might and Magic is owned by Ubisoft these days, and, as the story goes, it is only due to the near super-human persistence and passion of some of their employees—and the success of 2012 s Legend of Grimrock—that the project ever got off the ground.

I fervently hope it is not the last one.

Divinity: Original Sin

With Divinity: Original Sin, the fine folks at Larian Studios managed to fulfill their ambition of providing world interactivity on a level with Ultima 7, which has always felt a decade ahead of its time in that regard. But that s not the whole story: in the process of doing so, they also created what might well be the best turn-based combat system in any RPG ever.

I do not say this lightly, or merely to underscore just how good it is having played a good chunk of them, I truly cannot think of any RPG which does turn-based combat better than Divinity: Original Sin. Its combination of a polished action point-based free movement system with highly meaningful and novel environmental interaction and a huge variety of spells and skills allows for almost limitless tactical possibilities. Even over the course of 70+ hours and a very combat-heavy final stretch, this ensured that the encounters never got old or repetitive.

On top of these achievements, Larian have also proven (again, really, after all most of the Infinity Engine games did the same) that it is possible to create an uncompromising, deep, old-school RPG experience while including full campaign coop, a lesson I hope many other developers will take to heart. Larian themselves are already planning two new RPGs based on their engine, and I can t wait to see what they come up with.

Shadowrun: Dragonfall

Out of the games I ve chosen to highlight, Dragonfall might be the most story- and character-driven. It is set in the Shadowrun universe, a veritable smorgasbord of science fiction, fantasy and cyberpunk, and a personal favorite of mine. While Dragonfall was originally released only as an expansion to last years Shadowrun Returns, developer Harebrained Schemes realized its full potential with a stand-alone Director s Cut version.

This second campaign improves upon its predecessor in many ways, both technically as well as in gameplay design. Saving works more like you would expect in a PC RPG, and throughout the campaign there is a lot more choice in what missions to undertake and their order. Skill checks in dialogue and quests also seem more evenly distributed than in the earlier game, which makes a larger variety of character build choices viable. Finally, your core party is now made up of true companion characters rather than faceless hirelings. And crucially, the developers still manage to nail the mood of the setting.

Very recently, there have been some rumblings about a Kickstarter for a third Shadowrun campaign, and if they pan out I ll make sure to be among the first to sign up for it.

Wasteland 2

The first big crowd-funded RPG success, Wasteland 2 took a lot longer than expected to reach its full release, and had some significant polish and enhancement performed even beyond that. But the wait was worth it: inXile delivered a huge, sprawling post-apocalyptic RPG with a wealth of unique locations meshing into its central story, old school party creation and a large selection of character skills.

While some interface niggles remain—the relative utility of skills may be somewhat imbalanced and no single element reaches the heights of Divinity s combat system or M&MX s exploration—on the whole Wasteland 2 is much greater than the sum of its parts. As a result, it is perhaps the closest of all the games I ve chosen to highlight to delivering the complete isometric RPG experience which fans have been clamoring for.

One thing is for sure: it comes as a huge relief to me, and probably many RPG fans, that inXile proved their skill to some extent with Wasteland 2. Their next task is, after all, to create Torment: Tides of Numenera, a spiritual sequel to one of the genre s all-time greats, Planescape: Torment.

The others…

It feels unjust to cut off the more detailed look at individual games and developers at this point, but sadly time and space are limited. In any other year over the past decade, each of these games would have caused a splash in the RPG community, so relegating them to this part of the article is merely a concession to the massive quantity and quality of this year s releases. Each of them is absolutely worth checking out, and all of them have something unique to offer.

Blackguards hex-based strategy and faithful adaption of the pen-and-paper Dark Eye ruleset are absolutely worth a closer look. And the same applies to the sublime blend of exploration, dungeon crawling, and puzzle solving which can be experienced in Legend of Grimrock 2.

Dead State presents a unique RPG experience and simulation of survivor behavior in a zombie apocalypse scenario, and Lords of Xulima combines isometric exploration with a first person battle system in an interesting reversal of the celebrated Realms of Arkania series.

… and the Rest

An interesting note about this renaissance of the CRPG sub-genre is that, despite the huge number of games, it seems to have left other releases in the broader sphere of RPGs mostly unaffected. This might be at least partially explained by the fact that many of these games were made by new companies, or separate teams in established development houses.

Be that as it may, the point is that there have also been a great many action RPGs released in 2014, and some of them of surprisingly high quality. This of course includes games such as From Software s Dark Souls 2, a great sequel to one of the best action RPGs of all time, and solid new entries in established franchises like Risen 3. However, there were also some jewels created by smaller teams, such as the dialogue-heavy Consortium which explores the idea of an RPG taking place in a minimal environment.

And to top it all off, the new trend of Japanese ports exposed PC-only gamers to some true classics of the genre for the first time this year, with the obvious headliner being Valkyria Chronicles. Oh, and there was also a great new console-style RPG released on PC in the form of Obsidian s South Park: The Stick of Truth.

The future is so bright we ll need shades

If there were no upcoming CRPGs at all, or if, after 2014, we d revert back to the sporadic release schedule of the past decade, we wouldn t have a renaissance on our hands. 2014 would be an aberration, a glorious one for sure, but still only temporary. However, that isn t the case. While it still seems doubtful that 2015 will deliver the same quantity and quality of RPG releases that we saw in 2014, that is an impossibly high standard to set. Indeed, it is easy to argue that even during the golden age of the genre, the number of quality releases per year couldn t quite match what we have experienced over the past 12 months.

That said, 2015 looks like it will put up a fight nonetheless. There are, of course, the heavy hitters: Pillars of Eternity and Torment: Tides of Numenera—though the latter might not quite make it by the end of the year. They are supported by a scaffolding of promising independent games like Serpent in the Staglands, Underrail, and of course the grandfather among them, Age of Decadence. And some of this year s games will see sequels in 2015 already, including Blackguards and The Banner Saga.

I am almost at the point where I would appreciate the releases slowing down a bit so I have more time to catch up.

Almost.

Killing zombies isn t the thrill of Dead State. It s finding a toothbrush. Or peanut butter. Or seeing your survivor group finish building a well. To Dead State, winning the post-apocalypse doesn t mean being the best killer, it means being the best manager. Among the hojillion of zombie games, it represents one of the few unsensationalized views of the end of the world. There s plenty of turn-based zombie fighting, sure, but you measure your success as a player by how well you re meeting your group s daily food and fuel consumption, addressing morale, resolving disagreements, or how sturdy your exterior fence is.

Yes, Dead State isn t without issues. My review outlined the crashes and bugs I experienced, at least some of which were addressed by a December 19 patch. I expect DoubleBear, the developer, to chip away at the game s problems into 2015. All that considered, I d throw my grandmother off a roof before I let some technical hiccups deter me from playing something so original in its spirit. I d take something flawed but fresh any day over a polished version of something I ve played a dozen times, like Far Cry 4 or Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare.

Some of my praise comes from the fact that Dead State is so uniquely pen-and-paper in its design and storytelling, some of which comes as result of its low budget. It takes some amount of imagination and restraint by the player to invest themselves in the world, considering Dead State doesn t supply fancy cutscenes, voices, or even much character animation to express its characters. If you play RPGs hastily, zipping through dialogue to scrape the bare-minimum information that allows you to advance the plot, Dead State probably won t work for you. Some great dialogue (monologue?) comes out of the radio inside your shelter, as Richard wrote about.

Like a lot of our revered roguelikes and survival games, DoubleBear also does a great job of not holding your hand. The decision to recruit or turn away, to engage or not, to help or backstab is purely yours, and Dead State rarely tips its hand mechanically with any kind of morality points system. As you enter new locations, you can practically hear a dungeon master say something like, You approach the truck stop, tasting the scent of dogs and diesel. Underneath a gas pump, you see five men gathered around a fire pit. What do you do?

It s a wonderfully, restrainedly unsensationalized apocalypse. There are no zombies with extraordinary abilities or unbelievable super-survivors. Your concerns are fairly grounded in the concerns of reality; the odds are just higher. I had to resolve a conflict between a black ex-con and a white cop who knew his history. I had to decide whether someone in my party getting drunk was just them blowing off steam, or a warning sign. I had to decide whether I wanted to help a party member carry out an abortion, and then find a nearby hospital clinic with the necessary medical gear if I elected to.

Maybe moreso than a lot of my moments in BioWare games, I felt like these decisions said something about me and my character. The way Dead State presents and then lets you navigate these grounded, relatable dilemmas makes it memorable. Rough edges or not, this is the open-world survival sandbox that old-school RPG players deserve.

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Radio is easily one of gaming's least seized storytelling devices, and that's a real pity. I was thinking of this while playing Dead State the other week, a game that for its many flaws does a great job when it comes to character writing, and one character in particular - the last DJ whose broadcasts you can tap into on a daily basis. I really liked him, and the functions he serves - to offer subtle hints about what to do next and where to go, to provide a connection to characters outside the player's sphere of awareness, and to add a touch more humanity to a world that can so easily dissolve into just mechanics and challenges.

What's really great about him as opposed to most in-game hosts is that by and large they tend to be one note so that you can dip in and out of their content more easily. GTA's hosts for instance each tend to be one key personality trait, as do the likes of Three Dog in Fallout. The DJ in Dead State though is the hero of his own little story, much like Cecil over in the wonderful Welcome To Night Vale podcast. Each day you can check in for a little snippet of story, which seems him bouncing from cheery nihilism to serious depression at being locked in a booth with dwindling supplies, to slivers of hope, like his genuine happiness at getting a call from someone just wanting to know if he's okay and the effect that it subsequently has on his mood. 

"Here's the thing. So, I don't know what's wrong with us as a species, but from what I'm hearing most of you suck and... no, that's not the right word. What I want to say is, most of you are complete assholes. No, still not right. Oh, I have it. Irredeemable cockwipes, but like, in a way that doesn't sound flattering. We've got the dead coming back to life, eating the living, and you fuckers are killing each other over cappuccino makers? I mean... how did it come to this? Aren't we supposed to unite against a common enemy. Aren't we supposed to be made stronger? Apparently not... you DESPICABLE GAPING ASSHOLES! What's wrong with you people out there? What the FUCK is wrong with us? (rant continues a while longer)" 

...

"I received words of reassurance last night from May - who won't give her location - over the shortwave. She says she was concerned about me, how I sounded yesterday, and called me to make sure I wasn't giving up already. That was really sweet. And here's what I had to tell her - no, May, I'm not giving up. I'm here for all you out there. I want to help keep people alive with information. I want to be a comforting voice when all people can hear is moaning or silence. I'm not going to let this beat me, and neither should you. I know there are good people out there and I know they are going to find a way to survive, and I'm here to remind you of all that. May also told me that while she liked that someone was still playing music, she didn't necessarily like my music. So I asked May what she liked, and turns out she's a country kind of girl. Bless her heart. Well, May, I'm afraid our musical tastes are a bit different, so I don't have any of the names you were looking for. But to make up for it, here's a somewhat faithful cover of one of your favourite songs by a pretty redhead with a prettier voice. Here's hoping it makes your day just a little better. May - thanks for worrying about me. Also, I can't promise it, but I will try to keep the profanity to a minimum."

Checking in with the radio each day quickly became one of my favourite parts of Dead State. It's not clean writing, it's not polished, but the rawness of even the unspoken lines did so much for creating that world and breathing in the kind of sentiment that as a player with a Quicksave button, you're inherently cut off from. To us, a zombie apocalypse is mostly about having fun with a type of enemy that acts as the monster world's equivalent of bubblewrap. To those actually within it, the starvation and tension are something else, which has to be conveyed somehow. Often, that's in the tiniest details, like here - that as much as May is representing a warm presence, she's still cagey about the obvious threats. A couple of days later though, she reappears in a call-in, volunteering that there are farms and orchards 'out her way', as she and the DJ get a little closer. In these moments, the show goes from being just one crazy guy who locked himself in a booth to a little slice of the community and trust that's otherwise been lost being slightly reborn on the airwaves. That continuity is vital to why the broadcasts work so well, and would so easily have been lost by just writing a ton of statements and rolling a dice each morning in the interests of mixing things up.

Dead State has problems. Its character writing though is fantastic stuff.

Radio excels at filling in that kind of content; it's diegetic narrative, in much the same way that audio logs were originally meant to be before becoming utterly ridiculous. (Note to industry: If we're not recording audio logs now, we're not doing it in 2040 either. Please stop it at once.) It's the cheapest possible game content to produce, but so effective. Unlike video content, it's also possible to background-it, letting it sink in or ignoring it if you suddenly have to put full concentration on something else. It helps that because of the nature of radio as a passive medium, its importance isn't assumed in the same way as other storytelling devices. Done right, it pretends to be background noise, while still casually informing us of the world.

And done right, it's surprisingly flexible at this. GTA largely pioneered it as part of the experience (there were other uses before then, but nothing so advanced) and ultimately ended up building a whole radio universe with people like Lazlow and Fernando jumping around between channels, as well as one that realised that by turning characters in the game into callers and continuing the stories there, we could see more of them than people like Claude or Tommy or CJ or whoever else would be able to while dropping into their place on business. The choice of radio station for each faction was used as gang colours, with the old-school gangsters favouring the classical music of Double Clef FM while the more modern Colombian faction rocked the short but powerful Scarface soundtrack for all it was worth.

On a smaller scale though, individual bursts can say a lot about a game's culture and continuing story. Vampire: Bloodlines for instance featured an in-game show called Deb of Night, with its smoky, sleazily voiced host trying to keep control of desperate late-night callers in a world of vampires and other monsters. It plays while in your apartment, and does a great job of setting the tone for the world that you're about to step into - a nocturnal new life of just as much craziness as menace. It's a tiny slice of the game, but still one of the most memorable ones - for its placing, its purpose, and its atmospheric value. Quite often it's the most irrelevant bits in games that stick out the most. As Jeanette's chest subsequently proves.

Shows aren't the only thing that radio can do either. One of this year's best uses of them came in Wasteland 2, which early on tasks you with saving two towns - the one that provides the water, Highpool, and the one that provides the food, Ag Centre. Unfortunately both are attacked at the same time and you can only help one. The result is a brilliant section where you're saving the day for one set of people while hearing the deaths of the other in your ear the entire time - the anger that they weren't chosen, the pleading for someone, anyone, to be sent, and then finally the resignation. "Don't come. There's no-one left." Ooof.

While it would have been enough for the game to simply show the aftermath, this adds a fantastic edge to it - giving weight to your decision from the moment you make it, foreshadowing the darkness that you're going to find when you finally go to the other town, putting a human voice, if not face, on the horrors going down, and grounding any sense of victory at having saved one with the spitting hatred of those you chose to let down. In the case of Ag Centre, you arrive to find the people slaughtered or being mutated into agonising pod creatures, with its former owner barely able to scrape out a "Fuck you..." before dying horribly.

Again, nothing but radio could have done this so effectively. The passivity especially adds to the sense of helplessness it creates - that you can't get on the line and apologise, you can't explain it, you just have to sit there and soak in your choice for a little while. At the same time though, you're never stopped in your tracks for a finger-wagging, and the mood isn't broken by dodgy CG or distracting FMV in the corner.

More games really need to learn from this, and the other good examples. Radio doesn't get as much respect as it should in the real world, especially since podcasts came along, but it's a powerful form in its own right. (One of my big sadnesses with the death of the World of Darkness MMO was that you just know that fans would have set up awesome in-character stations for its single-shard world. One of my fondest MMO memories is seeing out City of Heroes with The Cape Radio reporting live on the closure, and I was really hoping for something similar to fill in the quiet moments. Oh well...) Nothing allows for more responsiveness, more raw feedback, more affordable bursts of character, or for so well rounding out a world and giving it a life that exists beyond the bits you can directly see, touch and shoot. Games have proved it in the past, Dead State and Wasteland 2 this year particularly proved it (with South Park drop-kicking the alternative exactly as hard into the pit of mockery as it deserved.)

Will people take notice for 2015? Stay tuned to find out.

I take you now... to the weather.

My best day in Dead State was also my worst day.

On a single scavenging trip, I d found three consecutive fruit groves: tomatoes, oranges, and apples. It was a huge haul of non-preserved food, one of the hardest things to come by in Dead State s apoco-sandbox. The same afternoon I recruited a new ally, an ex-con with mechanical skills, and scored nine whole gallons of gasoline, enough to keep our generators going for two more days. I d also found my first compound bow, a ranged weapon with replenishable ammo. Returning to my shelter that night, the survivors back home had finished building a wooden fence, giving us a better layer of protection against zombies and bandits.

The next morning, someone else in my group pulled me into a room and shot me. Despite yesterday s victory, morale in the shelter had cratered over the past week, and they d had enough of my poor leadership. Game over.

Dead State captures the struggle of rescuing and then looking after a group of variously helpful and troublesome people in the zombie apocalypse. Holed up inside a high school, your goal is keeping these folks safe, fed, supplied with weapons, in good spirits, and keeping them from killing each other or killing you. You wade out into the Dead State s mangled Texas to gather supplies in a turn-based combat system similar to Fallout 2 or XCOM. Everything you scavenge, sometimes at the cost of party members lives, goes toward keeping others alive.

This sums to Dead State being one of the best campaign games on PC—on par with Xenonauts or the recent XCOMs as single-player experiences where you struggle toward a finish line that you re trying to get as many people as possible across. But Dead State is also more flawed than these games: bugs, crashes, and engine quirks add a layer of technical struggle atop the story s. These issues hurt the game s rhythm—I found myself quicksaving aggressively out of paranoia that I d encounter a crash. There are also areas where Dead State s budget feels too modest for its ambitious scale. Still, this is a memorable and unabashedly PC RPG, admirable in its openness.

Doom economics

I love the way that Dead State tabulates the progress of my fledgling survivor group, almost in the style of a tycoon game. Each day terminates with a score screen that tallies morale, food, medicine, and gasoline income and deductions. This apocalyptic Excel sheet prompts you to set your own goals: if food s low, I set out the next morning to see how many fish I could catch at a lake, or knock over a supermarket, or take some party members off guard duty (endangering the shelter s protective fence) to build a permanent, food-generating shelter upgrade, like a garden. There isn t a great variety of activities in Dead State—its verbs mostly amount to kill, explore, loot, talk, and build—but I always felt like I had complete agency over which problem I wanted to solve and how to solve it. From the moment you exit the shelter, for example, no part of the world is cordoned off.

Party characters do provide some tasks for you to tackle inside that sandbox. Anita, an ex-trucker, asked me to find a medical dictionary so that her daughter Renee could improve her healing skill. Vic, one of the cops in my party, told me to visit a police camp and gave me unique dialogue options when I chose to bring him along. These people also come into conflict with one another, depending on who you let into the shelter and who s left alive. The preacher that I took in, for example, contributed to morale on a daily basis, but when I also gave refuge to a brash biker character (who s a terrific asset in combat), she started harassing him and I had to step in to mediate.

These social interactions and Dead State s story come to a head during crisis events, pivotal plot moments in the campaign where party members take sides on issues. When the shelter couldn t agree whether or not to spend labor and valuable resources to investigate an issue with our water system, I decided to invest as little as possible in solving the problem. A compromise. This weak decision actually upset everyone, damaging morale. But hey, I d saved some construction parts for other projects, right? Navigating individual character politics while working toward the greater good makes for interesting moral gymnastics—I later bribed the biker character by letting her take some stuff storage in exchange for her support during the next crisis event.

As a party member yourself, Dead State gives you a good spectrum of dialogue to pick from, letting you play as a no-nonsense, ruthless slave driver or an understanding, perhaps too-forgiving appeaser. I leaned toward the latter on my first playthrough, and I love that Dead State punished me for it—my the more, the merrier policy meant there were more hands for labor and combat, but also that there were more people butting heads. It was much harder to keep everyone happy, and my morale was slipping. At one point I considered taking a chronically depressed, morale-eroding party member into the field and getting them killed just to alleviate the situation. At another point a different depressed character did me a favor by killing themselves.

Outside scripted events and interactions, though, the shelter stagnates. It s an area where I felt the limited reach of Dead State s budget. Party members operate essentially as static dialogue dispensers. They each have a small amount of personal lore you can plug them for while talking in the shelter, but otherwise all you can do is bribe them with unique luxury items (like deodorant, coffee beans, or batteries) to improve their mood. I wish these characters were more expressive within the shelter itself.

ZCOM

Far more of your time in Dead State is spent stabbing, bludgeoning, and shooting than talking, though. The combat adopts a standard turn-based template, with AP consumed for each move, reload, or attack a character performs. The balance of it is surprisingly good given the size and varied layout of Dead State s isometric maps, a few of which are so big that they might take an hour or more to clear. I particularly like the way melee weapons have different utility attacks. In addition to a basic attack, shovels have a higher-cost knockdown attack, for example. Knives have a chance to counterattack. Wrenches and axes can cripple zombies, preventing them from attacking. A sledgehammer and baseball bat can attack diagonally. This asymmetry, combined with character-specific weapon proficiencies, made the process of gearing up satisfyingly deliberate.

What wore on me, though, was how tedious zombie-killing became after 10 or so hours. Zombies are completely static unless you or an NPC are making noise (by bashing a locked door, for example) or if you enter their line of sight. Once I got a hang of the combat, areas that only held zombies became a cinch to clear because a skilled melee character with the right weapon can kill a zombie in a single round.

I also had to restrain myself at some points from exploiting Dead State s noise mechanic, which is extremely effective in some situations. On a snack cake factory map, I lit a single firecracker and lured away every violent biker away from their post, then I looted the interior without a scratch.

Combat is satisfyingly chaotic when more than two factions are involved, however, and there are points where I liked using noise creatively. In a shopping mall, I wanted to break into a corner of the map that armed looters had barricaded. Knocking on their only entrance would ve gotten me killed, so I outsourced my siegework to zombies, making noise with my firearms to put them in the looter s line of sight. This stimulated a fight, thinning both sides enough for me to move in.

Broken world

I enjoyed grappling with Dead State, but it fought me plenty along the way. Crashes to desktop—more than a dozen in 51 hours—cropped up at various points on two different PCs. I also experienced sluggish performance on some zombie-heavy maps, where Dead State dragged on for needless tens of seconds each combat round as it pondered which chess moves the undead should make.

There were other, ancillary issues too. One game location, a motel and gas station, was permanently in turn-based mode whether or not I was in combat, making it a tedious chore to navigate. Walls would also occasionally become see-through, letting me get an unfair glimpse at the threat inside before entering. After recruiting a cat to my team, Dead State loaded me into a black screen the next day, an issue I had to load a previous save to work around. I was disappointed that I never had to use antibiotics, a consumable item, to manage infected characters health. I m not sure if that was a bug, luck or bad balance.

Those issues aside, the biggest design sin is how static the shelter feels. I like that completed upgrades are visible in the shelter, but the limitation of Dead State s animation is transparent here. New characters simply stand like statues in the same area throughout the campaign, preventing the shelter from feeling more like a lived-in, evolving space, and you from developing a stronger relationship with Dead State s centerpiece.

Dead State gets far on the strength of its writing and its pen-and-paper spirit. Its slice of Texas is dotted with busted gas stations, restaurants, and offices that are fun to comb for loot. The game s technical flaws are a burden to the player, and simple zombie behavior eventually dulls the tension of fighting the undead. Still, what it offers as an RPG—grounded survival drama, tough character conflicts, and generally good turn-based combat—is rare enough to make it worth playing.

Dead State sounds really cool. It's an isometric "zombie survival RPG" in which you not only have to hold out against an uprising of the undead, but must also deal with the needs and problems of your fellow survivors. Our alpha review described it as "promising" but noted that it suffered from too many bugs to be worthy of a recommendation. I'm hopeful that the final release version has been appropriately tightened.

Work has been ongoing since that early review: A beta version of Dead State came out in late August and several patches have been released since. Developer DoubleBear Productions said the current Early Access version is "essentially the final game," although balancing and content additions are still underway. But the seven day limit has been removed, and the team is confident enough in the game's progress to settle on a launch date of December 4. It will be available on both Steam and GOG, and go for $30.

Dead State features base-building and turn-based combat inspired by games like Fallout and X-COM, but it's the promise of "complex character interactions" that has my attention. As anyone who's survived a zombie apocalypse can tell you, the real trouble comes not from the hordes of the shambling undead, but from all the jerks who somehow manage to avoid being turned.