State of Survival Review 2022

State of Survival aka SoS is a RTS game with a zombie apocalypse theme. Despite it’s appearance SoS is not an isometric TPS, the mini game included is a short action game but this game is not a FPS where you aim and shoot zombies in an open world. Check my review to understand a bit more about SoS.

What is the Story in State of Survival?

It’s been six months since the zombie apocalypse began. A virus has infected the city. While trying to survive this horror by yourself, you meet a young girl named Maddy and a military soldier known as Sarge. In order to survive, you are invited to a settlement by the leader of the survivor Becca. Help those people to build a settlement that survives the constant waves of zombies. This is where your adventure starts in the State of Survival.

How is the Game play in State of Survival?

At the start Becca and the other survivor will guide you through the tutorial where you will need to train troops, attack zombies, craft gear, upgrade buildings, micromanage you resources, defend your settlement and attack other settlement later on. As all RTS, the game is a race against time. The faster your settlement grow means the faster you will get access to better feature, units and buffs. The mini game is just part of the game to let you have some fun beside managing your settlement.

Buildings

Playing a RTS game without the city builder part is simply impossible, buildings are the core of your game. They can be build anywhere inside your settlement and you can upgrade them to get additional benefits from them. Each of those buildings have an important role, here’s a list of them.

• Headquarters – Unlocks other buildings, give access to skins and settlement buffs, access to Defense system after unlocking Plasma
• Hero precinct – Locate and upgrade heroes, also give you access to explore mini game
• Barracks – Train Infantry units
• Garage – Train Rider units
• Range – Train Hunter units
• Training Camp – Increase training capacity
• Research Lab – Research Tech to help boost your settlement
• Assembly point – Help Alliance members and receive reinforcement
• Hospital – Heal wounded troops
• Workshop – Craft then upgrade Chief Gear and Hero Gear
• Enlist Office – Recruit back part of your army who was kill
• Command Station – Give access to Rally
• Trading Posts – Trade resources, access to VIP store and to the Market Stall
• Events Billboard – Provide rewards from events and Daily drops
• Intel Post – Provide Intel for loot and survivors
• Lookout Tower – Detects incoming Recons and enemy marches
• Blast Shelter – Keep a certain amount of troop safe for a limited period of time
• Warehouse – Keep resources safe from plunder
• Farm – Produce Food
• Lumberyard – Produce Wood
• Furnace – Produce Metal
• Gas Tank – Produce Gas
• Broadcast Office – FAQ, Tips, Support, Community
• Institute of Plasma – Advance research for Plasma units
• Purification Center – for crafting Plasma and Polymerized Plasma
• M.I.G.O CENTER – Research to obtain bonus buff for events
• Hangar – For upgrading aircraft and enter Joint Exercises

Troops

Second important thing in an RTS is your troops, those guys/girls who fight for you everyday. They have 11 Tiers for each unit and those are 3 type of units,

• Infantry – Strong Defense but low Offense
• Riders – Balance Between Offense and Defense
• Hunters – Strong Offense but low Defense

Troops will help defend your settlement or attack other settlement, troops and building. You need to set a formation, select the number of each unit, then send them to do their job. But you can do even better by adding specific hero for each type of units.

Heroes

Adding heroes will give your troops a bonus buff depending the rank and skill of the hero. Hero can be obtain in Hero Search or by collecting 10 fragment to summon that unit. Hero have different rarity;

• Rare – Starting heroes, weakest among them, easy to max and to obtain their fragment in hero search
• Epic – Strong enough until you get legendary heroes, fragment obtainable in hero search
• Legendary – the strongest and fragment mostly obtainable in events

You will need to upgrade them to be able to use them effectively and for that you will need more fragment of that unit. Fortunately you will be able to collect them via events or converting hero fragments later on.

Gear

Another way to boost even more your troops is crafting gears. There is 2 type of gear

• Hero Gear – 3 parts for each type of hero
• Chief Gear – 6 parts for your chief

Both of them will give a good boost, you can upgrade your gear to a better grade later on. But the materials are hard to obtain so this make take a bit of time for F2P but you will get there eventually. Gear grade starts Green > Blue > Purple > Gold > Red, for now only chief gear can be upgraded to red but red hero gear is coming soon.

Let’s not forget about Badge, they can be equip in specific slots in the chief gear. They have the same grade system as the gear, so you need to craft it first then upgrade it later on. They also give a good boost to your troops stats. Someone with good gear and badge can be much stronger than someone with the same settlement level but with poorly equipped.

Talents

SoS does have a talent tree which let you obtain skills and buffs for either economical or war purpose. You will obtain points each time your chief levels up, currently max level for chief is 60. You can mix both of the talent to your choosing and can easily reset talents if needed.

Stamina

In order to kill zombies, save people and join rallies, you will use stamina. Each activity consume a certain amount of stamina, you can lower stamina cost by using a hero call “Travis“. You have normally 200 stamina at max, however you can stack more stamina over that number but it’s not recommended. As stamina regenerate after time and you would be wasting precious stamina not letting it regenerate.

Note that the explore inside your settlement does not consume stamina as it uses another bread instead. Bread also regenerate and have a maximum of 100, you can also stack bread. But after your done with the explore, you won’t comeback to play this mode anymore later in the game.

Exploration

Although this is only a small part of the game but we see sit in so many in trailers of SoS. Exploration is a isometric action game where you explore an area with 3 of your heroes. The area is divided into 2 phase, first one is where they can move and collect resources and second one is the fighting take place. When fighting phase starts, your hero will take their respective position. Rider and Hunter will always be at the back and the infantry hero will be in front.

Normally you get 2 waves of zombies rushing towards your heroes and the last waves is always the boss. You have different type of boss which have different attack pattern, this is where different type of hero shines. Events also does have exploration mode but only the fighting part and only the boss fight.

In the end, exploration is fun when your still have weak heroes but gets boring to watch everyday and is one of the activity that takes more time in Intel. As you can see it’s not a TPS as you don’t really commanding these units to fight. They will just auto shoot on their own and use their skills when you have enough energy in the charge bar.

Farming

Farming is part of the game but you will send some units on a resources tile for gathering. Be careful as the risks of tiles attack!! Hoarding will make you a target for sure even you can defend yourself on 1 vs 1 but you won’t be able to defend against a Rally of multiple player.So to avoid all of these, farm only when you need too or when there’s an event and don’t hoard resources unnecessarily.

What kind of Graphic does State of Survival use?

The game is a 3D graphic as a PS3 game, although in exploration mode the graphic is a downgraded 3D version. Buildings are animated, you can see people or zombie walking which you can interact with. Outside you will see zombies, infected fiend(a mini boss), settlements and march units, all of them are also animated.

The heroes received a lot of love and attention in details. They are unique and different from each other, it would have been nice that the zombie received the same treatment. The zombie look ugly, look they only drop a skin on a rigid 3D model. For a zombie apocalypse game thy could at least give them more details.

A zoom in or zoom out option, a lite mode when outside the settlement for faster loading. You can visit other people settlement which not many RTS have this feature. The UI is clean enough to not interfere when your playing, red dots can be annoying to see for some people.

Controls

State of Survival controls are limited. This game uses a queue system, meaning you can do 1 action at a time. Same goes for your army, 1 army at a time. You cannot select multiple buildings or army which make things more tedious and old school. Expect a lot of tapping to do simple tasks and to play a RTS game after all.

In the exploration, only the front unit can move to different spot. The skills of the each unit can be trigger if your not using auto, some unit can deploy a turret or traps and require you to place them in a different spot. Note that these spot are limited to 6, let’s say you have not full control over them.

Sound & Music

The main background theme a guitar soundtrack mixed with some relaxing country music. They do change the music to different version of the main theme depending on season or event. The exploration has it’s own zombie rhythmic music that match the zombie apocalypse theme. Each hero has a voice actor even they say only 1 line all the time.

The sound effects are very well done, you can clearly hear the sound of different weapon shooting, hitting and exploding. Different zombies have different sound effect like grunts and screams when you fight them in exploration.

What is the Game Length of State of Survival?

As a RTS game, SoS requires a lot of your time for early on. Once you reach mid game, let’s say settlement level 25, things will slow down considerably. So early require you a full attention of 1 to 12 hours of active game play everyday. Around mid game 1 or 3 hours per day and finally you reach the end game is only 1 hour per day to complete your daily quests.

Now if your going to participate in event such as Trap, Reservoir and Capital. Prepare yourself to add several hours together with your daily 1 hour. Unfortunately you can’t play passively by doing only dailies and log off. As you will set back your account progression and you will end as an easy target to bigger player.

Remember that your not playing this game alone, if your in an Alliance, please do your part as a player and be active for at least some hours of the day. Playing passively will slow down your Alliance progression and you will end up being a burden for everyone.

Is State of Survival Free to Play?

State of Survival is a very F2P friendly game, only limiting factor are the resources and time. So you can say you won’t meet any paywall, nearly all the resources you need can be obtain by playing the game everyday and participate in events. Biocaps are fairly easy to get, your second builder can be bought with Biocaps for a limited amount of time. One of the only game where you can upgrade and buy VIP status with in game currency.

Is State of Survival Pay to Win?

However the game is also heavily P2W as the cash shop gives those who is ready to spend, an overwhelming advantage compare to F2P. Recent updates making the gap becoming valley between cash player and F2P. Skins, frames, march and some heroes or fragment can only be obtain via cash shop. Skins and frames are exchangeable with tickets but the amount of ticket you will need make it a Cash feature.

Now some of you may say it’s P2W but if you think of it. State of Survival is a RTS where you can’t solo to win. You will need an Alliance help to progress and you will need to help your Alliance to grow stronger to compete with other player. That include both F2P and P2W together which make a sort of balance in the game.

Of course not all state have that balance, some have real power balance issue where an alliance consisted of only Cash player. Apply Tyranny on the whole state until they get bored or eventually kill the state. So in the end it will depends on what type of people you will be playing in a state that will make this game hell or heaven.

Ads

No ads.

Micro transaction

As expected from a mobile game, State of Survival has a cash shop. You will find monthly subscription, daily package, resource package, VIP package, hero package, time limited package, biocaps package, top up package and let’s not forget season pass. Price varies between $0.99 to $100 which is the typical value of micro transaction in a mobile game. Player should be careful as you can easily spend $300+ with buying small packages.

How long is State of Survival Life span?

The advantage of RTS games, they tends to stay for a very long time as long as they keep updating the game and keep the player happy with new events. Even that State of Survival is starting to show some aging in terms of old mechanics, they have enough player base to continue for a good amount of years. Merging dead states and having state vs state will always keep a competition between player and help extend it’s life span for quite a long time.

Benefits

Become a fine strategist when competing against stronger player or alliance, learn the art of war with your alliance, share knowledge between each other. Micromanage your resources and try to challenge yourself everyday how to run your settlement. Meet with other people around the world, create new links and also new friends or even more. Take responsibility as an alliance leader or even as a single member, this game is a fine to learn strategy, management, communication skills.

Community

• Facebook
• Reddit
• Youtube
• Discord

Suggestions

• Let us choose which fragment we can obtain in Intel reward
• Make old hero viable instead of adding new one
• Stop making stronger new hero as this make old one useless
• Rare and Epic heroes are completely useless later on so add better utility to buff them
• Limit the amount of package that you can buy per daily as some player can max a hero in 1 day
• Add more way to obtain fragment of resonance hero
• Event rewards needs an update
• Teleport settlement to a random location when zeroed(barricade take days burn to zero)
• Add more slot for saved march slot
• Lower the requirement to unlock the second Talent set
• Daily rewards also need a upgrade
• Increase the quantity of items in the shop
• Provide shield inside in alliance territory

Updates

Regular maintenance, bug fixes, they are at least very active in maintaining the game, they also do add some new stuff to the game even things has been a bit boring lately.Recurring events weekly and new ones at once every 2 month.

They notify you in advance with patch notes, so that you can download patch in advance to avoid server overload on updates. So you can prepare yourself to keep resources for incoming events. New heroes are added every 2 or 3 month and they do have some interesting collaboration recently like Daryl of the walking dead series. The current one is the joker collaboration which is still going on.

Should you play State of Survival?

Yes, you should try it. If your a fan of zombie apocalypse and you like RTS game, this game is for you. Don’t let the P2W part bother you too much unless you want to be number 1 in your state. Compare to other game that require you to purchase a specific item to upgrade your HQ. SoS is surprisingly free of those and don’t have paywall.

While it’s true the game has both P2W and F2P business model, they are both legal way for a company to obtain revenue. Luckily you can play the whole game for free and unluckily some cash player may enjoy bullying you till you quit. Remember this is a war game and not a farming simulator game where you can only play the PVE part of the game.

Having a hard time in a state, does not mean that the game is bad and that other people should avoid playing it. If your state environment is terrible, you can always move to another state to start over. As you acquire experience from playing, you will learn how to really survive as both F2P and P2W in a state. So be smart, learn from your mistakes and rise up with a Winner mentality, try to be positive and not Toxic to others.

Gallery

General Information

• Overall Rating : Positive
• Type : City Builder, Strategy
• Category : Free to Play
• Contains Ads : No
• Micro Transaction : Yes
• Country : Global 
• Content Rating : Teen Violence, Blood
• Mode : Multi Player
• Published by: FunPlus International

Technical Information

• Google Play Score: 4.4
• Installation Size : 127 MB
• Full Size : 2.23 GB
• Platform : Varies with device
• Emulator friendly : Emulator friendly
• Connection : Online
• Available on : Google Play, App Store