In a zombie apocalypse, all I need to do is mash square… or something
What The Officials Say
Dead Island is an action role-playing survival horror video game developed by Polish developer Techland and published by German studio Deep Silver forMicrosoft Windows, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. It is centered on the challenge of surviving a zombie-infested open world island with a major emphasis onmelee combat. It was originally announced at E3 2006, but was pushed back to 2011. It was released on 6 September 2011 in North America, 9 September 2011 in the PAL regions and 20 October 2011 in Japan. A sequel, Dead Island: Riptide, was released in 2013.
What I Say
Dead Island is one of those odd games that’s fun for a while then becomes so repetitive that you just cannot be bothered.
Don’t get me wrong, I love zombie games. There’s something about them that I find fun and Dead Island gets the zombies nearly perfectly right. It just doesn’t get much else right. Yet in a strange way, it does.
The concept of the game is sound. Zombies everywhere, find items and cobble weapons together. When the weapons get damaged, fix them. Most weapons are melee because of there being a lack of guns and ammo. That all makes perfect sense and I dare say that if the situation in the game ever actually happened, this would be how it would be.
The problem with it is that the gameplay of it is naff after a while. You spend all your time bashing zombies over the head. It’s fun at first, but for a 10 – 20 hour campaign in an open world, you will get sick of it very quickly.
The zombie AI is quite nicely done. They act like classic zombies and are ever so slightly scary in dark and enclosed spaces. Having a zombie jump out at you never fails to be a shocker even when you know it’s going to happen. They have a tendency to bunch up and become a pack which is very nice and adds a bit of challenge to the game. Better than them all just lining up for you to hit with your baseball bat. The fact they are zombies makes up for the AI’s lack of intelligence. You will find them falling off things or walking into walls from time to time and they have absolutely no tactics, which is a good thing. Having zombies flanking you is a nightmare in any game.
The weapon system is decent, you find weapons about and you can update them and make them better using crafting benches in the safe zones. Crafting requires resources found out and about. The resources thankfully respawn periodically which makes life much easier. The crafting is very limiting and I rarely ever bothered to craft weapons. They simply aren’t worth the effort. Having a zombie vomit a bit isn’t helpful and electric weapons were so weak and useless. Virtually none of the upgrades for weapons do much damage. Upgrade the durability, sure. But actually upgrading the weapons is no good. Especially when if you get caught short on non-damaged weapons you may have to ditch some to get working weapons in the field. This happened more that I’d like to admit to me. It’s easily done. You’re exploring and a horde of zombies appears. By the time you’ve cut them down, you’ve used all your remaining weapons up.
The graphics to the game are actually pretty good considering that the game came out in 2011. It fitted well in with the 2011 games and I enjoyed some of the vistas in the game. They wouldn’t win any prizes but they were acceptable for the game.
Finally, we come to the plot. The less said about this the better. The premise for the start of the game alone is laughable. Zombies inexplicably take over and you wake up in a hotel full of them and somehow you haven’t been killed. But as soon as you wake up you’re faced with them. You wouldn’t have survived that so the game is pointless. The plot in the game though is overly long, convoluted and full of people going “Ooh just go to the other side of the island because I want this small pointless object of no real value” A couple of interesting things happen, A plane crashes and you end up in a prison. But they’re few and far between.
The game is worth getting if it’s going cheap. The upcoming steam summer sale for example. Otherwise, don’t bother.
DailyGilson 