We watched Undead Labs founder Jeff Strain play a rescue mission in Lifeline, and before he began, he scrolled through the game's interface for building out your base. As in State of Decay, your outpost becomes more challenging to manage as its population grows. Missions in Lifeline will focus on picking up people trapped in Danforth and bringing them back home so the military can extract them to safety via helicopter when the next resource drop comes around. That forces you and your comrades to head out of your base into town, in an attempt to rescue civilians and gather resources to fortify your defenses.

But all of it dwindles over time in the face of the zombie outbreak: Your supplies gradually deteriorate, and resupplies from your group's commanders become more rare.

Unlike in State of Decay, you start out with plenty of rations and support from the larger military. Lifeline casts the player as a member of Greyhound One, a small platoon that's attempting to maintain order in the overrun city of Danforth. But as we saw during a demo of Lifeline at PAX East 2014, that doesn't mean that the DLC will shy away from what made the original game so special: exploring the psychological effects of dealing with the undead. State of Decay: Lifeline, the second expansion and the first story-based add-on for Undead Labs' hit Xbox Live Arcade title, turns the tables on State of Decay by putting the player on the military side of humanity's efforts to repel the zombie threat.

State of decay lifeline