Another day, another zombie apocalypse, this time in smalltown America. Your character and his dour fellow survivors are stranded at a rural campsite and must make a dash to the nearest town to begin a quest for longevity, initially hooking up with a group who have fortified the local church. By scavenging supplies and weapons and recruiting survivors you gradually build up a resistance movement to be proud of, winning the trust of compatriots by protecting them from zombies and not running them over in your car or setting them on fire with molotov cocktails. That may sound easy, but State Of Decay’s dodgy controls and glitchy graphics make it surprisingly difficult to avoid the odd accidental immolation during the game’s flailing combat and messy retreats from zombie hordes. First released in 2013, this comes with both pieces of downloadable content and, although you’d struggle to believe it, has slightly spruced up graphics. Yet, despite its glaring flaws and downbeat low-budget feel, it still manages to deliver a weirdly compelling recreation of the daily grind of living with marauding bands of flesh-eating undead.
ALSO OUT THIS WEEK
Kirby And The Rainbow Paintbrush, Nintendo Wii U
Poor old second-rate Kirby, a Nintendo mascot loved by few, starring in games that rarely amount to much. Kirby And The Rainbow Paintbrush effortlessly joins this legion of meh, its tale of colour being drained from a magical kingdom proving as trite and unloveable as its pink marshmallowy hero. The game itself involves drawing lines on the Wii U gamepad touchscreen to guide Kirby towards collectibles and away from danger, a quick tap making him spin long enough to destroy a nearby enemy. Unfortunately the simplicity of its controls is undermined by finickiness, as well as Kirby regularly ignoring the rainbow-hewn line you’ve just drawn in favour of trundling to his death. These problems are exacerbated later in the game when you’ll need to guide two Kirbies simultaneously, and even sections where he transforms into a rocket, tank or submarine get tedious before their levels are over. And, unless you’re playing its tacked-on three player co-op mode, you won’t need your TV, instead spending the entire game hunched over the gamepad’s little screen. Although not actively offensive, the Rainbow Paintbrush is classic Kirby: forgettable.
Nintendo, £34.99
AUX B, Android & iOS
Rather than paper flyers or a cheesy app with a venue map you’ll never use, the B-Sides music festival (Lucerne, Switzerland, 11-13 Jun) has AUX B, a game that ignores pop stars, concentrating instead on life as a sound engineer setting up the band’s PA system. With no formal instruction you bumble about, using the onscreen patch bays to connect the outputs at the top of the screen to the inputs at the bottom via an increasingly bewildering array of phono and DIN plugs. Dragging your finger between two sockets of the same type automatically connects them with a chunky cable, adding to a growing spaghetti junction, with the interface showing signals pulsing down leads and output sockets buzzing with the anticipation of being connected to the next link in your rawk daisy chain. Successfully wiring each sound system results in the speaker at the very bottom emitting a brief burst of psychedelic sound waves before depositing you into the next puzzle. Complete all 80 levels before 15 May and you can win tickets to the festival itself. Or you could simply view this as a charming diversion from other “free” mobile games, which really just want to shake you down for spare change.
Christian Schnellmann, free
