Dead Island Review: A Zombie Paradise

Dead Island, where do I begin; zombies, zombies, and more zombies are a good start.  Techland developed this zombie slaughter festival of carnage and it really is a gore fest.  With a short introduction video scored by some rather ridiculous rap music the game screams campy right from the start.  This novelty setting stops there, when it is replaced with a more horror type survival setting.  Blood splattering blows, flying limbs, and boots to the face of screaming charging zombies wait in store for you in this tropical paradise.

Story

The story of Dead Island is pretty straight forward like most games involving zombies.  The zombie apocalypse has appeared on the island of Banoi, located off the coast of Papua New Guinea.  It begins in a tourist resort and leads you into the local’s area of the island and beyond.  Survival is the objective and what happens along the way is forgiven and forgotten rather quickly.  You play as someone who is immune to the zombie infection and take on the responsibilities of saving all the survivors you can from this

Spooooky!

The story for the game was a bit nonexistent, after being rescued by the life guard John Sinamoi you find yourself waking up in a small beach house full of other survivors that aren't lucky enough to be immune.  It then becomes your responsibility to protect and help these people escape the island.  The game progresses in different acts that ended rather abruptly, as you would suddenly be thrown a cut scene featuring all the players and they would bicker with each other over the best course of action even in single player mode. The game makes you out to be the hero at every turn, but then lumps you into a team effort giving me a “Oh, now you show up!" reaction.   This only added to my confusion of the story as these other people are nowhere to be found except for these brief moments.   The cut scenes I also found to be rather poorly written and predictable, when Sam B says "It's just like N'allins" (New Orleans) I almost turned the game off out of pure reaction.  Admitting the game is clearly designed for coop it would have been nice to see some thought put into the single player aspect of the plot advancement. The story also loses a bit of purpose after you continue doing these tasks given to you by the npc's.   Techland marketed the game before release that this story was going to emotional and hopefully you would care for the characters involved.  I found that really hard to do as some of the characters didn't seem to be overly concerned with the wellbeing of the other survivors in the cut scenes they show.

Gameplay

What are these for?!

Dead Island is a massive game right from the start, almost too massive.  There is a fast travel feature that helps but that only lets you between "safe hubs" which there are few of in the game.  I found myself spending a lot of time running the same paths killing the same re-spawned zombies quite a few times.  The game has a very large amount of side quests and some do apply to the main progression of the game.  Some of the side quests are just strange and seem extremely out of place and most seem to be "fetch" quests where people are sending you out to get them things they really don't need and usually in the area you were just at before.   Something that really got on my nerves from the survivors you encounter along the way was that they all seem to be constantly moving or shaking and rarely looked at you in the eyes.  That probably sounds trivial and like I'm looking for flaws but the more I played the more it chipped away at me.

Kick it! Kick it!

The melee focused combat system of the game was really fun and rewarding.  Even after you have played it for a bit those head exploding critical shots with your favorite mace or baseball bat are still extremely satisfying and entertaining.  I found myself laughing with delight in mid combat quite a few times.  Weapons are abundant but frustratingly fragile; thankfully they can be repaired at lots of work benches scattered throughout the areas.   Strangely these workbenches cost money, this didn't make much sense to me as there was no one charging me to use them, it felt like I was leaving my precious cash there on some sort of honor system and then I would go rifle through someone’s belongings to generate more.

The game has a good weapon quality system that displays items rareness by color of the name.  While unoriginal it’s a classic way of doing this and I appreciate it.  It also has a really impressive modding system that applies to a large variety of weapons, like the Nail'ed mod can be applied to all wooden stick type objects, these mods get even more fun the further into the game you get.  The mods require ingredients found throughout the island whether in trash cans or on dead zombies, some harder to come by than others.  While limited to how many weapons you can carry on you at a time, there is no limit to how many parts or how many random items’ you can carry.  My personal favorite was my "Bolted Metal Baseball Bat"; it was the cause of quite a few exploding zombie heads!

A huge draw back I noticed in the gameplay was that it was very much created with the console in mind.  The mouse and keyboard functions where painful.  The inventory is poorly managed with a mouse and feels tedious.  If you do play this on PC I urge you to use a game-pad with it, will make it a much better experience.

Graphics

Derp...

The graphics of Dead Island where far from bad, while not the best I have seen lately.  The textures could have used a little work but hardly crossed my mind as I ran through wrecked streets and jumped along roof tops.  The environments I thought where well put together, slightly repetitive at times but that isn't surprising for a sandbox game as big as this one.   There are plenty of crevices and tucked away areas, giving you a fun sense of exploration with hard to find rewards.  The various types of zombies looked detailed with really great animations, unfortunately the player animations where laughably bad.   I was surprised by this because the well done animations of the undead seemed to make the player animations stand out even more.  I think one of the best aspects of the game though is the awesome job they did on the violence factor.  This game is brutal with blood, dismemberment, and bone breaking critical damage.  Heads literally explode, limbs are cut off beautifully, the gore was done right and it’s awesome.

Sound

The sound effects where pretty good, unfortunately any sense of music was not.  There was small radio's around that you could interact with on occasion that played some little bits of music and some action music kicked in with different zombies but overall the music was rather unmemorable.  The sound effects though did give a good sense horror, random zombie screams in the distance or maybe coming from right next to you.  I found myself on edge quite a bit of the time due to those heartwarming zombie groans.

Hi Brutus!

The voice acting was well acted just poorly written.  The various survivor's you encounter all have very unique dialogue.  A good example is a certain survivor that need's his brother rescued, it was comically acted and hard to believe it wasn't intentionally stereotypical.  This is constant throughout the characters in the game, they are over the top in the roles they are given or they are just hysterical and obnoxious.

The first night myself and some other GamingCX contributors grouped up on Steam we couldn't help but panic as this loud screeching deafened us all.  After we all ripped our headsets out of their respective USB ports and did some searching we realized that there was no mute button or a push-to-talk key.  I'm sure this has something to do with the PC version once again being a watered version compared to consoles that have things like Xbox Live overlays with mute features but Steams voice system doesn't seem to be much help with the PC version of the game.  PC games need push-to-talk keys it’s just that simple.

Overall 

Dead Island was great concept with poor execution; it has a really fun gameplay presented in a quickly thrown together package.  Sort of like that gift that you can tell is a new Xbox Game but it’s wrapped in newspaper.  I think if Techland had taken maybe another month or two before releasing it and done a little more polishing we could have seen something a lot better.  I had the unfortunate experience of playing it on Steam and that fun of them releasing the developer's copy to Steam; I was told the console version is substantially better and less buggy.  As of now Dead Island has had two updates for the game and it is getting better.  The multiplayer is still broken and quests still bug out, hopefully these will be fixed soon enough.   Once again though the PC market appears to have received the short end of the stick, with console versions receiving more time and polish.  Why release it on PC in the first place then, oh that's right... money!