Dead Island Previews

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Written by BuckGB on June 27th, 2011

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The game changes depending on how you'd like to play. When I was alone in the single player game I enjoyed the more deliberate pace, and I rejected the few missions available during the demo to simply explore the island and play with the many improvised weapons while killing every zombie I saw. There is a heavy emphasis on melee weapons in this game, which means that the zombies get very close to you, and that's a nerve-wracking experience. It takes practice before you can judge the reach of the many weapons, but soon enough you'll be chopping off heads and legs, or taking out the shambling horrors with thrown weapons.

Don't worry, once the zombie is dead you can pull out that ax and use it again. So that's nice. There are guns, but ammo is at a premium, so you'll want to use them sparingly while doing the majority of your attacks with knives and blunt objects. You'll also be able to upgrade your weapons at workbenches to create deadlier items.

My companions and I collected a quest from one of the inhabitants and set out away from the safety of the church. The people who aided us in the demo let us know that although we'd be sticking to this one specific quest, you can grab several at a time from various people at the different outposts in the game world. We were also told that Dead Island's multiplayer is a drop-in, drop-out affair. So long as there's a spot open, any of your friends will be able to jump in and join you on your current zombie-killing engagement.

A few observations about the gameplay and presentation are made quickly after leaving the church. The graphics aren't the most jaw-dropping you'll see, but they won't detract from your experience. The mini-map in your upper right corner will show you a constantly updated red line to guide you toward the next goal in your current quest. When you pull up the main map and decide to move around, the map will become transparent. Also, each player will have a stamina meter. This meter will be used up when you jump, attack, run, dodge, or do anything that would obviously use energy in the real world. As your stamina runs out, you'll slow down, be unable to jump as high, and your attacks won't do anywhere near as much damage. It's a nice system that shows you're not some sort of superhuman Energizer bunny that keeps going and going and going.

While in the safe house, we were able to buy a variety of weapons from a weary shopkeeper and then use a workbench to repair and upgrade them. Whereas other games put an emphasis on FPS gameplay, Dead Island focuses mainly on melee weapons. Guns are available, but ammo is hard to come by, so it forces you to choose the time and place for firearms wisely. I equipped weapons like an axe, machete, and knives, and after repairing my death tools, I was able to upgrade some of them with extra goodies. For example, my machete after I was done with it would jolt zombies with a major electrical shock. Yes. Yes. Yes.

I should mention, however, that we were given an unlimited bank account to play with during this demo (all the repairs and upgrades costs money, of course). In the real world, you'll have to start at the beginning and earn your own money, but during this demo, we rolled out in style. This is an important note, because Dead Island is an RPG, so a large part of the gameplay involved leveling up, collecting money, and strategizing how to use your resources to maximize your killing potential.

It was pointed out at this stage that our weapons were even less immortal than we were; a feature of Dead Island that you have to be vigilant about is that weapons will degrade to the point where they become useless, necessitating repairs and meaning that scooping up as much of a backup arsenal as you can is a very good idea. A quick check confirmed that I was already packing more kitchen knives than Gordon Ramsay's voodoo doll, and with my trusty modded machete in hand, no one could stop me. Except that pew. Okay, I found the jump button, no dramas.

Before leaving the safety of the church for our new objective, everyone took the last opportunity to get a feel for the controls. We were tasked with an errand of putting up missing posters for a young woman even St Jude would hold his hands up at that one on boards scattered around the area. Our leader burst through the church doors and we scampered out, ready for action. Except that I was still fiddling with the controls and accidentally managed to throw my machete away. Shit. I hastily retrieved it and scurried after everyone else. The first impression was that the city lacked serious janitorial attention. The area had clearly been hard hit by the mysterious zombie tragedy, and was largely deserted. The environment immediately leapt out for its level of detail and for the clear attention to textures and small touches but, sadly, I didn't have time to dawdle at the back and stare at walls and crates as I am apt to do, because it wasn't long before we were under siege. Zombies, thousands of them; wait until you see the bloodshot veins in their eyes lads. okay, there were maybe five. All eager to get stuck in, we piled in for the attack, knives flying everywhere. One enterprising guy on the team had armed himself with a wrench. I must have missed that in the church and immediately suffered melee envy. That feeling quickly evaporated, however, when my first zombie frazzled to death thanks to my electricity mod. Let's see your wrench do that.

Each character has their own unique Fury ability that can be upgraded through their skill tree, where you're able to spend XP to bolster proficiency in combat, survival, stamina and other key skills. These skills will come in handy fighting the tougher classes of slavering undead, such as the Ram who we encounter later into the demo. He's the straitjacket-wearing maniac who charges at whoever is antagonising him the most, which is incidentally where the multi-directional jump comes into play. Jumping and pressing any direction enables you to make evasive hops forward, left, right and backwards, so as the Ram runs at us we're able to leap to one side and attack his relatively exposed back. Once the Ram is dealt with, we carry onward, raiding weapon chests and trashcans for weapons and supplies, finding a pistol with a few clips along the way. We pump a few bullets into some zombies, with a few headshots having the desired effect. One of our teammates then sets up a gas canister and we shoot it prematurely amid all of the hubbub. There's no friendly fire, but splash damage from an explosion can damage an ally we find out.

We find the pistol comes in handy again as we run into looters going on a rampage and attacking anyone on sight, which shows that it won't be just zombies you'll have to worry about. The uninfected human race is bad enough as it is. And so our hands-on session draws to a close as we loop around back to the church where we began. Stopping to look at the in-game map of the fictional island of Banoi, we can see the green sectors that have yet to be explored, showing that we've only visited around 8 to 10 percent of the entire island. Dead Island confounds our expectations as to what we thought it would be like, blowing our last look at the game out of the water. It's not only a remarkably brutal first-person melee actioner, with kicking melee attacks, punching, shooting, masses of sharp and blunt weaponry and head-stomping, but Dead Island appears to have all of the requisite RPG aspects firmly in place too. If Techland can deliver the kind of well-paced action we've played through thus far, with RPG depth and an interesting enough story, Dead Island could be another worthwhile entry into the annals of zombie gaming history.

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