I had some fun with State of Decay 2. I would describe it as a zombie sandbox roguelite(though each session is far too long to be very roguey I guess), which sorta does an okay job of putting up an illusion that your characters are unique and have defined characters when... they don't really? Your characters are kinda defined by a mixed bag of traits so you can have characters that are absolute equivalents of one another.
You're basically trying to reclaim society in a zombie apocalypse. You can set up a base, gather more survivors which gives you more people to work with. Death is permanent as well. The overarching goal of the game is to destroy all the zombie nests around the map, and each one gets more difficult to tackle as you destroy more.
You can build a radio and eventually get quests to rescue people or do other sorts of things, and this can lead you to meet other subfactions whom you can build up relationships with for various benefits.
The general game loop is just scavenging resources, doing sidequests, building up your base and gear and then taking out a zombie nest when you are ready to.
You also have to elect a leader of your community, and they come in various 'classes' which determines what unique base buildings you can build and some other traits I don't remember. This is also tied to the ending of your game. After you clear all the zombie nests, you have to finish the questline of your leader which then finishes the game.
You can then start a new game bringing forward some gear, characters and such and start a new game in a different location. There's quite a few maps to play in so there's some replayability. And the idea is to increase the difficulty as you go along.
I got the game to play coop with a friend. It doesn't have a proper coop? You bring one of your settlement's characters to play in the host's gameworld. Based on how much you do there and how long you play with the host - you get a bunch of rewards after you leave. You also keep any loot that's on your character and loot is instanced for each player so there's no need to fight over loot with the host player. A problem I had with this system is that my characters would get exhausted or injured, and I'd have to log off back to my own game to get them to rest and recover. I wish I could just take control of my friend's settlers and play alongside him rather than having to manage my own game.
I liked the combat, except the juggernauts which felt too bullet spongey. Otherwise it feels good sneaking around, headshotting zombies or stealth killing them. Melee feels good too.
I think it's well made, but I kinda saw through the illusion I guess and it didn't appeal to me so much. It's a bunch of modular pieces of game that rearranges itself in slightly different ways that gives the illusion of a bespoke experience, when it's actually procedural in nature. I have a friend who kept playing through multiple games, carrying forward stuff, increasing difficulty and trying to get all the endings. I didn't manage to get one ending cause after destroying all the zombie nests on my map, I had my leader questline bug out. Due to the procedural nature of the quests, I just got dealt a shitty hand and had to kill inaccessible zombies or loot inaccessible bodies to progress. I got stuck, quit and restart and had to redo the entire questline and I kinda just ragequitted after that.
Fundamentally it's just a loop of procedurally generated zombie flavoured activities.