Dead Island is a semi-openworld game where you exchange bad quips and mallet whacks for experience points. You can play as one of four different characters all of which have different abilities and different “Problems.” Zombies have taken over the island and it is your job to go on a bunch of fetch quests that force you to run through thousands of zombies. Luckily running around on Banoi island is kind of fun and most of the time is very beautiful. Unluckily Dead Island is nothing like the original teaser trailer no matter how hard it tries to be.
I feel very conflicted about Dead Island, in that it feels great to kill zombies but that might be the only thing going for it. To be functionally playable all it really needed was some sold melee combat though, which it has in abundance. In the early part of the game you will be scrambling to find a pipe or an oar just so that you can continue to survive. During these parts the zombies feel kind of fun to mess around with but also very dangerous. Your basic early game strategy will be to kick the zombie and then attack it while it is on the ground for extra damage. Late game however involves a lot more of timing your shots correctly to eliminate one zombie before his eight friends converge on you as well. During these times the combat is frantic and fun if at times a bit overwhelming, especially for one player to deal with. The crosshairs become your best friend because they have a sort of auto aim the helps you determin the swing as well as a specific body part you might want to hit. It may seem like you will always want to aim for the head and that is the most efficient way to dispatch a zombie but this game makes it very clear that it is an RPG and not a survival game. What I mean by that is that when you simply kill a zombie you get some experience but when you break both their arms and then chop off their head you get a whole lot more experience.
At first I was very put off by the whole RPG element of the game and it bothered me to see numbers flying from zombies. Then I realized two things that changed that, the zombies scaled in level with me and I could turn all the number flying off, which I did. This may just be a personal preference for my style of play but I was not expecting Borderlands Island when I got this game. Once I took away that HUD element I was left with a much more rewarding experience where I actually had to pay attention to the zombies rather than a floating health bar. Now the RPG element feels a bit more sensible, in a zombie apocalypse you are going to get stronger and better at doing certain things or you will die. The only real side effect that this had anything on was the guns. In multiple previews it has been stated that the guns are rare because they are too powerful, not true and not true. I found guns everywhere after the first half of the game and none of them did what I wanted to a zombie. The side effect from the missing HUD was not actually making guns less powerful but rather making them seem more powerful than they were. When I am holding a revolver without paying attention to the arbitrary statistics I expect it to blow a damn head off. It should not take five headshots to bring down a normal zombie. This is an RPG though and wasting five bullets upon the head of some biter makes sense right? No, it does not. Dead Island also has a weapon customizing feature that is supposed to give you some cool crowbars and the like. What this usually boils down to is making something electric or on fire which sounds way cooler than it is. Finding parts all over the island to make some super powered weapon is usually a waste of time as the most you can ever hope to get is more fire or more electricity. It will boost the weapons stats but never in a hugely beneficial way.
This is where the game starts to degrade for me. Sure the zombie killing is fun and up until about the last five hours of the game remained feeling fresh. As I said earlier though zombie murder is about all it has going for it. Some of you that listen to the SaveGame+ podcast may have heard me ranting about some of the silly things that I found annoying in this game, like glass containers on the beach or the female beach-goers bikini dress code. I will not go into that stuff in this review because it would not be fair to dock the game on silly things because it has much bigger issues than a lack of ATVs.
Banoi island is actually quite a beautiful place. The palm trees sway in the wind and the rich jungle casts beautiful shadows wherever there is a break in the canopy. All of this seems great until you notice a tree floating about ten feet out of the ground. Then a zombie Houdini appears out of thin air and attacks you for staring at his tree. Once you beat Zombini you might notice that some trucks have been magically upgraded with self operated hydraulic systems. No you have not gone down the rabbit hole into another realm, you are just stuck in the broken world of Dead Island. I truly wish that I was making up some of the glitches that I saw such as yellow road paint floating above the road. Not all of the glitches are cosmetic either, some will actually affect your game. While trying to complete some of the side missions I was following the minimap to a portal that would load me into another location. This portal was on a boat docked near a bridge only it was not. The minimap was telling me to just go to the portal on the boat but their was absolutely no boat there. Other times the minimap would lead me to a location and then expect me to become Mutant Man Hunter and either fly into the sky or phase through walls. My character could do neither of those things, however zombies somehow have these abilities. On several occasions I was attacked through walls by zombies on the other side. On some rarer occasions zombies would push themselves, through what I can only assume is magic, past the walls and come into a room that I was in. Invisible women groan in pain, shacks are on fire with invisible flames, fan blades make noise without moving, and explosions will hit you through several walls. These are, in all honesty, just about one quarter of the glitches I noticed in Dead Island that helped to pull me out of the experience.
I can normally look over a little brokenness in a game as long as the story and gameplay are good enough. In Dead Island only one of those is true. The story is the most inane sort of atrocious malarkey that I have ever attempted to put my brain around. I played every side mission, that it would let me complete, and watched every cut scene in this game so that I could make sure that I was not missing some key point that would bring this story together but there was none. The little bit of story they do have never ties to anything and is never fully explained. To add to this Dead Island take precious story explaining time and devotes it to character building time, which never works once. None of the character share a believable tender moment. Every cutscene involves Sam B saying something is “bullshit” while Logan acts tough, Xian says something about staying together, and Purna stares off into the abyss like some Botox patient gone wrong. In fact they all kinda look like twitchy Botox patients with their jerky heads and deadpan faces. Plus every time a cutscene is in motion it reminds me of stop frame animation from old childrens shows. The framerate is so choppy that I can barely ever tell what is actually going on and that is also thanks in part to the terrible camera angles. One cutscene in particular had all the characters warped to another location while zombies ran towards them on a bridge that seemed to flicker in and out of existence. Just do yourself a favor and skip every cutscene in the game.
I have heard that people prefer this game when played with friends and I will admit that that is when the only fun part of the game, zombie killing, really starts to shine. However, everything else is subsequently washed in a pile of garbage juice as parts of the game start to break even more. A friend of mine played through a good portion of this game with me and his system locked up two times while playing this game with me, but only when playing co-op. Some of the glitches mentioned earlier get only worse especially textures that will either never render or float in mid air. When playing single player texture pop up is a normal and forgivable thing but when playing co-op I have seen textures pop in a full thirty or more seconds into playing. I should mention that all of this still happened after the patch which was supposed to also fix matchmaking, but did not. The pinnacle of jank though in the multiplayer is when it breaks quests forever. Not only will it sometimes just never let you track a quest ,for some arbitrary reason, but it will without regret break a quest line. By the end of the game I was left with three incompleteable quests that for some reason broke when I started to play online. I wish that I could explain how this happened so that I could warn others not to play that way but I have no idea how it happened, only that it did once someone came into my game or vise versa. It is for those reasons that I do not know if I can actually suggest playing online. I will say though that the last quarter of the game assumes you have a partner by the difficulty ramp so that is something to keep in mind.
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With so many abundant problems and a story that is lackluster at best I do not think I can recommend this game. However with some really fun gameplay and the possibility for some fun co-op I want to recommend Dead Island. Now hopefully you understand where my conflicting feelings about this game comes from. The early game was really fun and fresh but the late game felt contrived and broken. It took me thirty hours to complete Dead Island and by that time the little things that bugged me had become serious issues. I might have enjoyed the game more if it was just a bit shorter because as it is Dead Island has actually made me sick of killing zombies. When the only good thing about your game is shoved into your face over and over in an attempt to blind you from some of the other problems you will wear out your welcome very shortly. If you are really looking for some fun zombie killing then pick this game up. If you are looking for a high polish, emotional, and technically well put together experience then Dead Island is not a place that you should visit.
Great! Thanks for the share!