State of Decay 2 shows all the ways you can slaughter its zombies in latest trailer

Open-world zombie smasher State of Decay 2 will shamble onto our screens next month, and developer Undead Labs has released a new trailer showing us what to expect from the game's combat. The highlight is a fight against an over-sized zombie who's so big that the player can grab onto his neck, swing around onto his back and stab him in the base of the skull. Ouch.

In general, the combat looks slick, apart from one awkward moment where the player throws a zombie at another enemy and misses, but the second zombie still flops over comically like an athlete feigning an injury. Away from that, there's all the stabbing, shotgunning, and running over hordes of walkers that you'd expect. If the first game is anything to go by, then it should be fun.

Skip to 0:52 in the video for the combat to begin—before that, you get a look at the game's crafting and simple building system, which lets you place structures on pre-defined plots in your home base.

State of Decay 2 will have three separate open-world maps, each featuring "slightly different" environments, and each roughly as large as the first game's world, which should give you plenty to explore. It's out on the Windows Store on May 22. Still no word on a possible Steam release, but I wouldn't hold your breath.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.