After five long years, the sequel to State of Decay has finally been released on Xbox One and Game Pass. As an open-world third person survival game, players assume the role of various survivors and establish a community while recruiting members, gathering supplies, completing missions, and exploring territory. Characters have a wide variety of items to choose from as they try to manage the zombie filled environment. Like many survival games, players have a limited inventory as well as limited access to personal storage and a dependence on basic supplies. Much like its predecessor, survivors must plan carefully to ensure they’re not stranded or killed in a world where characters do not regenerate and resources are finite.

For those new to the franchise, the game itself is relatively basic; success depends more on patience and planning rather than skill or timing. Players may remember an open-world with time-constrained missions and the almost irritating demands of the community. Survivors fight hordes, clear infestations, attack special zombies, or complete missions to gain influence points, which serve as both currency and XP. Fight and explore with endless vehicles, as long as you can keep them from exploding.

The State of Decay 2 offers an impressive variety of changes to the storyline and gameplay, as well as numerous new challenges and exciting items. Players can now choose from several generated characters instead of the three predefined character-story selections. The map is also infinitely larger, offering three maps to choose from that can be traversed depending on story and resources. The introduction of the plague system offers a new series of difficulties, including possibility of infection, producing a cure, and destroying the source: plague hearts. Plague hearts offer a new difficulty that feels similar to a boss level or wormhole digging in Metal Gear Survive. There’s also a highly anticipated multiplayer mode.

You begin the game the same as before; clear out zombies and establish a community. Afterwards, you collect resources according to community demand while recruiting new members that are needed as the original character becomes injured and exhausted. Changing characters allows each member to have their own specializations and skills, which benefit the community and player in numerous ways. Build up your base, change characters, and complete missions to further storyline.

Some might remember, the original game was wrought with glitches and flaws in game play that often trapped players or abruptly ended missions without warning. Truthfully not enough has changed.  The game is still filled with the glitches, which was sort of solved by the “Stuck?” feature on the radio that resets position without reloading the game, although the mission is usually irreversibly affected. Vehicles continue to get stuck to walls and barriers, players keep falling into walls/floors, and characters still have to find the sweet spot to open crates or utilize areas.

Sadly, the multiplayer option has fell flat. Players “volunteer” through the radio to help others or be helped by another online player. I have yet to see this in action. The game searches for volunteer opportunities but can’t seem to find players. The home base options were disappointing as well. Sizes are still extremely limited, utilities were expanded only slightly, and the ability to improve systems requires a book-specialization system that’s poorly explained. Considering the permanence of each decision, I found myself cursing countless actions that seemed like basic decision-making. Just like before, I found the pressure to maintain home base often overcame the time needed for missions or plague hearts; essentially, you’re still mostly running from building to building desperately searching for what you need while missions either disappear or timeout, sometimes without warning.

In general, the game is still very frustrating. There are new zombies, super cool items, more people/skills, and slightly better housing options. It’s much easier to change characters and I find complete failure isn’t ever-present like before. I like the additional challenges but ultimately there’s very minimal award to playing the game and a high level of repetition. That doesn’t change the fact that I cannot put it down every time I pick it up. I find myself feeling obligated to gather one last supply or rescue one last person then suddenly an entire day has passed.

I give State of Decay 2 a 6 primarily because of the persistent glitches and the developers failure to fix common problems. The improvements were exciting but didn’t deliver, leaving those of us that waited excitedly for so long feeling incomplete. Each time I it pick up the addiction makes me want to change this to a 10, but in the end frustration overcomes fun and I put it down for days feeling angry and unaccomplished.