Dead Island Reviews

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Written by WorstUsernameEver on September 5th, 2011

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You rarely feel safe in Dead Island, and that's how a zombie game should be. You have a limited stamina bar, so you can't run or swing your weapon forever. Med kits were few and far between in my experience, so scavenging for energy drinks and fruit -- which have to be used at that moment and can't be stored -- became part of the experience. Weapons degrade as you use them, so finding a "legendary" weapon was exciting, but not as exciting as finding a workbench to keep weapons in tip-top shape.

Dead Island made me my character. I chose the weapons, the enemies to attack, and the side quests to take. When I leveled up, I chose in which skill tree to invest my new point in -- so even if you joined my game as the same knives expert I play as, we wouldn't necessarily have the same abilities.

(...)

Is Dead Island perfect? No. Far from it. As much as I lauded it, Dead Island is rough around the edges and that's sure to turn a lot of people off. First-person melee combat doesn't feel natural right away. Sometimes textures take their time loading in, I'd describe every cutscene as "stiff," and the visual flaws like hands going through doors and weird mini-game meters made me laugh. Still, presentation doesn't make a game, experiences do. And they are packed into Dead Island.

I didn't encounter anything game-breaking in the 26 and a bit hours it took to complete the story solo, or during my forays into co-op play, but it would still be all too tempting to fill this review with complaints about the flaky game engine, the weird floating objects and distracting animation spasms, and annoying glitches like inactive quest points, inconsistent navigation markers and the general air of a scrappy half-finished game. All that stuff is in here, and can easily dominate the experience.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy the experience though. Dead Island is a deeply flawed game, but it's also clearly a low-budget game and one that has interesting ideas, often under-served by the bargain-basement code. Finding the diamonds in the rough demands a lot of patience, and enough investment in the base joys of zombie slaughter to tolerate the laundry list of flaws.

I suspect this will be one of those games that will be justifiably mocked by the majority for its many flaws but embraced by a forgiving minority, and passionately defended for its underdog status. Neither response will be entirely wrong. Much like gnawing on human flesh, Dead Island's clumsy horror-action role-player is the definition of an acquired taste.

Your quests will send you to multiple sections of Banoi Island, and each one has a distinct flavor of dread. An omnipresent sun bakes the walking corpses on the beach, exposing every oozing battle wound. The hotel's dark corridors present an entirely different atmosphere where creatures lurk just outside your flashlight beam. While terror doesn't appear to be Dead Island's top priority, being stranded on a huge island packed with monsters is unsettling. I could spend dozens of hours within the gigantic decaying city alone.

While the captivating locations and engaging combat should entertain zombie fans, Dead Island is missing a layer of polish. Navigating the menus, getting accustomed to the controls, and generally learning the ropes is a clunky process with few tutorials. And don't get too attached to your favorite weapons if you plan on using them as projectiles, because downed zombies sometimes disappear along with your meticulously upgraded weapons still lodged inside them. I also had an entire quest grind to a halt because my AI-controlled guide would either get snagged on geometry or walk in circles. NPCs aren't the only directionally challenged denizens of Banoi Island either, as the minimap's finicky pathfinding can occasionally put you on a wild goose chase. Techland says a day one patch will fix some AI and quest tracking issues, but at the time of this review those changes are yet to be confirmed.

I've played a lot of zombie games in my time, and Dead Island scratched an itch I didn't even know I had. Cooperative undead survival is nothing new to gaming, but exploring a gigantic zombie-infested island with friends is. I easily poured over 40 hours into my playthrough, and a new game plus promises even more entertainment. Rewarding character progression and the vast variety of weapons should appeal to anyone looking for a good time. If you've spent your time planning for the zombie apocalypse, Dead Island is the best option so far to test how long you'd last.

The game encourages you to throw weapons, but doing so risks accidentally tossing your prize into an area you can't retrieve it or under a pile of bodies where it's similarly inaccessible. Plus, when you're on the run for too many zombies to handle, throwing a weapon is basically saying goodbye to it forever. Another whole system that should be fun, but isn't.

While throwing weapons is cool yet too expensive, the melee combat that will be your stock-in-trade is just annoying. Encounters with single zombies is pleasant enough for a while, especially when you're lopping off limbs and heads. But the far, far more common scenario is getting attacked by several zombies at once and dying -- a lot. No matter what number you're facing, the strategy is always the same: Hammer on the right trigger. Just keep swinging, for hours. There's a "kick", but it only works on one enemy at a time and frequently misses, so it's not a reasonable way to buy yourself some space. The melee system is desperately in need of some depth or flow. A block button, for instance, would have gone a long way.

(...)

There's so much content in Dead Island, it's a real shame the work wasn't done to take it from functional to fun. Some of it works: There's a beautiful world to explore here, some genuinely neat ideas and cool weapons. But the end product too closely mirrors its antagonists: Shambling forward, but only just.

Without a compelling plot, Dead Island becomes too big, and certainly just not interesting enough to warrant yet another search for bottles of water for NPC X or the fetching of gasoline for NPC Y. Nothing ever happens, despite the Herculean effort the player ends up putting into the game by the end. The exploration of the huge world or the destruction of zombies might be an end unto itself with some friends in co-op, but alone it's extremely tiresome.

My playthrough for Dead Island's review was on the PC version, and it was a buggy, strange affair. I'm not sure if it was my review build or if the retail version will be the same way, but I'm forced to warn players away from it. Visual bugs infected the entire experience: my copy would never render fire or steam escaping from vents, or even the gross Boomer-like spit of certain zombie types. I had to use my imagination and lighting clues to guess where fire was so I could avoid getting burned, and despite my character yelling (Damn!) whenever I blew something up, I never got to see an explosion. Cutscenes, too, occasionally suffered some really weird visual issues. Audio also would sometimes cut in and out, and I caught more than one NPC switching voice actors from encounter to encounter. However, I played a fairly complete preview build of the first hour on Xbox 360 with no similar problems so I can't be sure if it's just me, or if the PC version really does have so many problems.

Dead Island does get a lot of things right, almost in spite of itself. It's a huge undertaking and you'll certainly get a lot of content for your money. The question is whether you'll want all that content, and I highly doubt that you will. Sure, it feels like there are 100 quests in Dead Island and if you play them all, you'll get 30 hours out of the game but they're all the same two or three quests, mostly offered by different faces. By the end, I found myself saying, (I have to go fetch you something again?) and no number of action-packed zombie close calls could make it exciting.

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