State of Decay 2 looks like it’s built on all the problems of the first game, from both a technical standpoint and a gameplay one. In the hands-off demo we saw at E3, we saw only minor bugs surfacing (and this was an alpha build, too) and there are so many more mechanics in this game that are going to make it a stronger, more fulfilling zombie survival fantasy than its predecessor could ever have offered.

The demo we saw would be familiar to anyone used to the series: we had a little community of survivors, each of which had their own traits. The two main focuses of our play through were Tiffany the gardener (who boasted that she never got sick, but was a guilt-motivated worker) and Matt, an ex-action choreographer and rampant snorer. Both of these two had skills that boosted their community (gardening skills and combat prowess), but both also had traits which negatively impacted the morale of the community, too.

There will be more than ‘a couple of hundred traits’ in the game, according to Undead Labs, and each will randomly be assigned to the survivors you encounter or recruit. The studio told us it was doubling down on RPG elements and character traits, and wanted to make sure that no two games would end up playing or being the same. There is no ‘hero’ character in the game - instead, each survivor is as important as the other, and you’re going to have to build a cooperative, functioning society in order to make progress in the game.

The devs playing the game sent Matt and a colleague out on a mission - Tiffany wanted to build a farm so that everyone in the community could be comfortably fed. To do this, however, Matt needed to retrieve some seeds for Tiffany, so he head out to the local farm. At one point, Matt fired a flare - this summoned another dev that was playing on another console who came in to help Matt.

This is the biggest draw of the new game for sure: not a lot has changed from the original title, but the opportunity to play all of it in co-op (up to four players!) is certainly going to be a major selling point. Despite there being no split screen available in the title, the option to go out scavenging resources and interacting with other communities is a fantastic one and like most Xbox titles nowadays, we’re sure the choice to not include local co-op won’t overshadow how satisfying the multiplayer is. Other players coming to your world to help out will also get rewards in their own game, too, so there’s always an incentive to lend a hand.

We could see this as Matt bombed it down a highway, his ally opening the car door to knock out zombies as they headed for a store where there might be seeds for Tiffany. Of course, all this is good and wholesome, but if you identify as a bit more of a bastard, you can always just go out, find other survivor colonies, see if there’s anyone you actually like there, recruit them… then pillage the place dry.

Our dev rep told us that ‘there’s always opportunity to be a bad guy’ if you didn’t quite fancy playing by the rules of a non-violent post-apocalyptic society. Shortly after, he showed us a new grapple mechanic, where you could pick up zombies, run off with them, use them as human shields and all sorts of other things. Instantly, our machinations were to infiltrate another community, find their most ‘high-value’ member, and use them as a shield as we take out the others, one-by-one, in order to take what we wanted. Mwahaha.

But the most pressing problem - as you’d expect - is the undead. As the devs found the seeds and started building their farm, it made a lot of noise. That noise drew the undead, and they began a siege. This saw hordes of the rotting shamblers come pouring in, and all the community had to pitch in to defend it (this, of course, caused some emotional distress and morale decay). This also let us see some new, tighter combat, and the Freaker class of zombies that will turn up: this time we saw the Screamer that kept attracting more undead.

It all ended up being pretty intense - Matt survived but got pretty messed up and injured. The farm was built, so at least the survivors could last a bit longer. But the long-term life of the community still had question marks above it, and it made us really want to pick up the pad ourselves and see how else we could expand our community, how else we could evolve our survivors emotionally, how else we could carve out a survival in this dying world.

That’s exactly what you want to feel when you come away from a hands-off demo at E3 - sometimes there are false promises in them, sometimes they’re outright boring. This one, though… this was special and it showed us a game that looks promising, and if it can perform on Day One like we saw it perform in Alpha, State of Decay fans are going to be very happy indeed.

Check out the new State of Decay 2 gameplay trailer below. It'll be coming to Xbox One and Xbox One X in spring 2018.