State Of Decay Hits Steam, Er, Sans Keyboard Controls

If guttural howls from those strange, primitive hill people in console land are anything to go by, State of Decay is apparently quite excellent. We at RPS have been eagerly awaiting its arrival on PC while sipping fine scotch and inventing new classical instruments, and now it's finally made the leap. Kinda. The nicely freeform zombie sandbox is playable on our platform of choice right this very second, but you'll have to contort your highly evolved digits around a controller in order to make with all the driving, surviving, and undead drop-kicking. It's not all bad, though. Undead Labs actually wants your help coming up with a fitting keyboard-and-mouse control setup - among other things.

To its credit, Undead Labs is being quite upfront about the current state of State of Decay:

"Greetings, PC players! This is the Early Access version (controller only, for now) of the record-breaking zombie-survival game State of Decay. Those willing to throw in with us at Undead Labs and your fellow early adopters will automatically get the final Steam version, completely free, with no need to restart, when we officially launch later this year."

"What you'll get if you choose to join forces with us to make the PC version kick ass is an unfinished CONTROLLER ONLY test version of the game. It's not ready to be reviewed. It will not be perfect. It may still have crashes. It won't have a keyboard and mouse interface...not at first. Over the next however-many-weeks, we will be putting up versions of the PC interface and using your comments and feedback to make it awesome."

Which is actually pretty neat, given that many console ports end up stumble-shambling onto our virtual lawns hamstrung by default control schemes that feel like they were intended to be medieval torture devices - not quick, comfortable means of coming to grips with new worlds.

It's only $19.99 too, which isn't bad at all for what's apparently a decently meaty game. I do believe I'll have a go at it myself before too much longer. How about you lot, though? Has anybody had a chance to put State of Decay through its paces yet? We'll have some impressions next week.