The idea of this game is interesting: a post-apocalyptic zombie survial game. But the implementation went very wrong because of a whole series of bad development choices. They tried too much to create the feeling of a hard survival sandbox game, with all the consequences that go with it.
While playing this game a thought was popping in my mind very frequently: "was the developer's wish to create the most frustrating title on earth?". Because that was the feeling while playing this.

I will list here some of the examples why I found the mechanics of this game so frustrating:
- the zombies respawn! what? how on earth is that realistic. in my first playthrough I was naively trying to "thin the herd" by killing hundreds of zombies all around the map, then I realized they respawn and you can't win the game by attricion. there is no end to them
- there is a limited amount of weapons, cars and tools. and they decay and break down. with each precious car you can squash only a limited amount of zombies before the car gets destroyed, so you have to be careful with weapons and cars because like I said, zombies respawn.
- the thing that most I didn't like is that you are bombarded with a large number of main quests and secondary quests at the same time, and they are all time limited. you literally don't know what to do first, and they keep adding more and more. those secondary quests are mostly some crisis that pop up all around like "infection detected in a building", "group of survivors under attack", "dangerous high level zombie detected" etc.......
Those are random events that raise the threat/danger level of the map, so you have to solve them as quickly as possible to lower the danger level to your base.
In my first playthrough I thought it's better to do this secondary quests first, but I was wrong. Those are just random "daily quests" that pop up all the time, you can't resolve them because they will pop up again in another part of the map. In the meantime the timer of the main quests would run out so all the quest line would be messed up. Then I realized that the only way to solve the game is to push through the main quest line, and do just as many "daily quests" as is needed to keep the threat level under control.
- you have to search for all kinds of tools, weapons and resources in the hundreds of buildings of the map, but you actually have very limited time, because as I said you are covered with timed missions to do, so you never have the peace to go from house to house to clear them of resources. in my first playthrough I wanted to be methodical and slowly go from house to house, but this game isn't about that, it isn't about being rational and methodical, it's just frantic time management with the little time you have.
- in a real world scenario a group of survivors would pick a good place for a base, and it would stay there for as long as they can, they would fortify themselves there, develop the base and clear all the buildings nearby and conquer as much space. but in this game you get to stay in a base only for a short time before the story forces you to move somewhere else (to another base), so you can never fortify yourself and slowly develop the surroundings. so all those common sense strategy elements are completely absent.
- there are so many limitations in combat and doing anything: you can run only a small amount before the stamina bar gets to 0 and then the stamina bar gets smaller and smaller so you ultimately can't do anything anymore. so the main character has to rest to restore the stamina bar. also you have to get medical treatment for the infection eveytime your character gets a bite from zombies. all those things need time. and when your main character rests or gets medical treatment you have to play with another character. but you can only chose another character from those people who have "friends status", but they could be currently absent (they could be somewhere scavenging - you can't control other survivors they do what they want, often behaving irrationally, they do dangerous stuff and die and get infected easily), and also they have a much smaller skill set then your main character so it's harder to do anything with them.
- combat is not done well. there are hordes of zombies spawning all the time so I quickly understood that the only effective way is to put them down with cars, while the melee weapons and firearms are ineffective against unending hordes of zombies.
- there is permadeath. in my first playthrough the main character died and the rest of the group didn't have the adequate skills to continue.
It's very hard to describe the feeling while playing this game, but in essence it often was like this: " I can't solve problem A before I solve problem B, but I can't do that because currently I have problems C,D and E....".
In my second playthrough I realized the only way to finish this frustrating game is to rush through the main quests, and so I did. But when you do that you realize that this game is actually quite short when you focus on progressing the story. All the rest is just sand box content: "random daily quests", scavenging etc....
There are dozens of mods online made by the fan base that correct all the frustrating elements of this game. That fact alone tells you how badly the developers screwed up many parameters, making this game a horrible mess.

i bought after playing state of decay 2 and i loved state of decay 2 but didnt like this

Played and liked the original State of Decay when it came out (~2015). Tried the Year One in 2025 and quit/uninstalled. Controls and graphics are pretty jank. I guess it didn't age well. Even with hardware far beyond its needs, the game doesn't look or play well. On to something else.