YMMV / State of Decay 2

• Anti-Climax Boss: The raider leader in the Sheriff legacy story gets built up over several quests, but can be killed with a single headshot, just like any other human enemy. And since he doesn't have a unique appearance, you'll probably kill him without even realizing he was the raider leader.
• Broken Base:
  • Fans are split over the amount of bugs in the game and whether their presence is forgivable.
  • There's also disagreement over the direction of the game. Should it focus more on the story and pick up the threads left over from the first game or should it remain focused on the sandbox experience?
  • Many fans love and despise the curveball update, especially the infamous black heart curveball. Many welcome the challenge of such a power plague heart having a random chance to spawn in, while many others call out how overwhelmingly strong the heart and following plague zombies tend to be, even more so on higher difficulties.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Plague ferals. The normal feral can be brought down with a single headshot. Not these guys, as they have an armor plate that protects their heads. Good luck getting multiple headshots before one tears into you. Not to mention, despite successfully dodging them, your survivor can still rack up plague just by being near a Plague feral when it lunges. It's easily the most frustrating enemy in the game, and the developers know it - which is why they don't spawn on any difficulty lower than Lethal (the very highest) during a normal game, or the Heartland campaign where they were introduced.
  • Human enemies on Dread and above. They don't go down easily, and they're deadly accurate — and they will snipe a headshot several hundred feet away from their base — and hiding in vehicles is useless.
• Difficulty Spike: The Heartland DLC is much more difficult than the base game in many respects:
  • Every zombie is a plague carrier. Yes, including ferals.
  • Ferals can now survive multiple headshots (landing just one was tough enough given how fast and erratic their movement is).
  • Juggernauts are tougher, deadlier, and the "sidestep them while they charge" trick no longer works.
    • Also, an early mission makes you deal with one out in the open. Fortunately, you're not required to kill it, and the best strategy is to simply run after retrieving the MacGuffin.
  • Zombie hordes are more common, and can contain up to 20 zombies.
  • Introducing the PLAGUE WALLS. Roughly seven times stronger than a plague heart, and it brings constant waves of hordes, ferals and juggernauts.
• Funny Moments:
  • A Trade survivor may yell, "LOCK AND LOAD, MOTHERFUCKER! IT'S TIME TO REGULATE!"
  • One Curveball starts off with rumors circulating in your community that an enclave self-destructed due to their stills blowing up while trying to brew moonshine. The result? A small area of the map temporarily contains alcohol-drenched zombies that explode into toxic moonshine when killed. They also have more of a chance to drop whole bottles of luxury alcohol... however the hell that works.
• Game-Breaker:
  • If you bring the Haven device to Whitney Field in Meagher Valley, you can have the Announcer Box summon zombies — which Haven will destroy immediately. This earns the player 200 Reputation points. It isn't an exploit, either, as the Survivors will yell at the zombies, "Yeah, we have CLEO on our side!" This is invaluable in Lethal mode, since players can now get the best equipment from traders and allies. Not as effective as of the Heart Attack update as it'll now have to recharge after killing a certain amount of zombies.
  • Daybreak adds the prestige merchant, which allows you to use prestige from the Daybreak mode to buy various facilities and weapons in the main game. Rather than risking your survivors going out and scavenging for explosives to easily destroy Plague Hearts, you can just play a match of Daybreak or two to grind the prestige needed to buy some explosives from the traders. Unlike in the regular mode, your player characters from Daybreak can be killed with little consequences. The only problem is having to endure the mind-numbingly boring Daybreak mode to get those prestige.
  • Even better, rather than wasting prestige on explosives, you can just use it to recruit Red Talon operatives instead. All Red Talon survivors come with late-game stats and have reduced community standing gain, allowing them to carry out missions without causing a difficulty spike from increased community standing.
  • Scentblocks make you completely invisible to zeds unless you literally bump into them. Using one allows you to just walk to a Plague Heart and whack it to death with the zombies none the wiser. The only threat you still face is Ferals, who can still sniff you out, but they are not hard to dispatch when you are not distracted by other zeds.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Plague zombies. They're just as easy to kill as the regular zeds, but so much as getting scratched by one will increase your infection meter, and if they grab you from behind, it'll increase it a LOT.
  • Just like in the first game, Juggernauts. Sure, they're very dangerous and can easily kill a survivor, but you almost never need to fight them and can just run away. But, if they're in an area you want to loot you'll have to wait for them to despawn. They're more of an area-of-denial threat than anything.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The consensus seems that very few SOD2 fans enjoy Daybreak. It's extremely grindy, it has the exact same zombies per wave every single time, and the tiny game map never changes... so, the experience never changes. To unlock the higher tier stuff, you'll have to play this game dozens of times. Worse, to buy more CLEO ammo in the standard game, you have to earn more prestige by playing this game mode. And worst of all, the game is very, very, VERY stingy about giving you prestige points. A full Daybreak game lasts 50 minutes and you'll only get 500 prestige — which isn't even enough to buy a full clip of submachine gun ammo. It quickly becomes a chore to play this mode, and if you want to use CLEO weapons in the base game, you'll be forced to play it a lot.
    • The rate at which you earn prestige has seemingly gone up a fair amount to where you can probably gain at least 400 even if you only make it through three waves, but given that you'll have to survive at least 3 waves in order to unlock new weapons one by one, it's only so much comfort.
    • While the CLEO weapons are superior to the base game weapons, that's only true by a very small margin. It hardly seems worth spending hours grinding away in a repetitive slog for a weapon that performs just marginally better than the standard armament.
  • The Black Plague Heart Curveball is one of the rarest, but it's also the most gameplay-changing due to its nature. One Plague Heart on the map gets its health buffed up to insane levels and is resistant to everything aside from one specific type of damage, which isn't initially revealed to the player. As if that weren't enough, this particular Plague Heart also buffs the zeds in a gigantic swathe of the map (sometimes up to half of it), with the same area of effect drastically draining the fuel from any vehicles in its vicinity, requiring players to hoof it with plenty of stimulants in tow. The only chance players have against the Black Plague Heart is talking to a survivor studying it (often within earshot of the Heart itself), who demands a handful of Black Plague Samples to determine its weakness. Long story short, if one of these pops up on the map, it's going to be a long and grueling uphill battle.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: At launch, a common complaint is that the game is far easier than it was hyped up to be. As long as you accept the fact you'll occasionally lose survivors early on and not have enough time to do all side-quests, it's rather simple to get into a position where your community is self-sustaining, making resource gathering unnecessary. Same goes for the Blood Plague; it's so easy to avoid getting infected and even if a survivor is, plague samples are so easy to come by that it's a snap to have the cure on hand.
  • Granted, ever since the introduction of difficulty levels, you can easily induce a Sequel Difficulty Spike instead, with triple the plague hearts on the map, barely anything to pick up, plague freaks absolutely everywhere, rapid resource expenditures at your base, and Blood Plague that kills your survivors in FIVE MINUTES once contracted, assuming they don't get so much as touched by anything that would plague them even further. Hope you still find those plague samples easily!
• Too Awesome to Use: 40mm Grenades. By far the most rare ammo type in State of Decay 2, 40mm Grenades are launchable explosions that deal massive damage to anything they hit and a single grenade can wipe out a tightly clumped horde with a single well-placed shot. The only problem? You MIGHT find about five grenades that will naturally drop over the course of an entire game, and even then, finding something with which to shoot the grenades is equally ridiculously rare, often necessitating seeking out a rare-items vendor. Once you finally get your hands on a grenade launcher and enough grenades to feel comfortable taking it with you into the field, you'll already be used to practicing much more scrappy methods of killing zombies. Not to mention, the player has been using soda can bombs or molotovs over the course of the game which leaves the 40mm grenades not impressive enough to put the cheaply made items to shame (beyond their impact explosions and faster fuse time). However, they can still prove absolutely invaluable when Blood Juggernauts show up, especially in Nightmare and Lethal levels, where two may be in a horde and you need everything in front of you dead again NOW.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Almost everything the Lifeline DLC brought up was ignored by this game, despite Sasquatch returning. All that stuff about the special zombies seeming like they were designed rather than random mutations, the shady bio-technology company, the Army falling apart? Doesn't matter as this game opens up months later with the Army collapsed and no one knowing or caring about what happened in Danforth. However, in Heartland, the aforementioned plot elements are retold, albeit slightly differently, and in Homecoming, the ruins of Danforth can be seen still standing ominously in the distance and a future DLC may return there, or may be reserved for State Of Decay 3.