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Review: Dead Island

by Steven Williamson on 19 October 2011, 12:06 3.0

Tags: PC, Deep Silver

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It's more fun with friends

If you think that’s bad, be very careful when throwing your weapons. Throwing your bladed weapons to slow down the advancing enemies as you desperately wait for your stamina to recover, before tearing them out of the zombie and lopping off its head is literally some of the best action and entertainment offered by a game of this type. However, if you happen to lodge a hard-won upgraded machete in a scripted enemy you run the risk of them being reset on your death, or in some cases, just plain vanishing – your weapons gone along with it.

Enemy designs are overly reminiscent of the Left 4 Dead franchise, each filling the standard cliché zombie roles. Shambling walker zombies and faster infected humans are plentiful, with the occasional stronger spitting, exploding or beefier zombie. The latter few can prove to be surprisingly difficult by yourself, which is when the addition of some co-op comrades seems to be a very good idea.



The cooperative system in Dead Island is actually very well realised. Players can drop in and out of each other’s games with relative ease, matchmaking decided both by level and main story progression. Enemy level (and in turn that of the loot) scales with the strongest player on the team though, so it’s important to keep turning in those repeatable quests to keep yourself strong enough to play your part. It’s in the 4 player co-op that the game really shines, too, with the driving sequences seeming less of an exercise in explaining to you the value of your peripheral vision, and how hard it is to navigate anywhere without lodging yourself in a tree without it, when you’re carrying some teammates and cargo back for a quest, the hordes chasing you.

On the subject of co-op, too, Techland have announced plans for an arena-type DLC adventure named the “Bloodbath Arena”, in which players can fight through 4 arenas, either alone or with up to three others, keeping their experience and loot for the main game. The DLC will also feature a leaderboard system, allowing you to compete with and against your friends. Those of you who pre-ordered the game too will also receive it for free. However, “Bloodbath Arena” has recently been delayed to the middle of November, the developer instead focussing on ironing out some of the aforementioned issues which have been affecting the main game. An admirable choice, yet one sorely needed to help Dead Island meet the potential it has, filling the void between true RPGs and the more comical, hack-and-slash action of Dead Rising 2.

Dead Island is perhaps the epitome of a 3/5 title. Maybe because of the long development period, or the success of similar titles over the last few years, the vision got somewhat lost along the way. Dead Island tries to do too much. It aims for the claustrophobic zombie hordes of some of its peers, the deep, involving quest trees of modern RPGs and it falls short through design mistakes and the limitations of the engine – the gunfights and driving sequences seem tacked on, the overall experience compromised in favour of adding as much variety in as possible. However, if you’re lucky enough to not be plagued by the numerous technical issues, or patient enough to not let them totally cloud your enjoyment of the game, Dead Island has considerable bite to it. It’s evidently flawed and lacks the budget and production values of an A grade title, but good, gory fun at the same time.

The Good



Satisfying melee combat Entertaining co-op mode
Slaughtering zombies with modded weapons

The Bad

Average production values never live up to the quality of the first cinematic Dead Island trailer
Tacked-on gunfights and driving sequences add little to the experience
Repetitive and flawed side objectives

HEXUS Rating


Dead Island


HEXUS Where2Buy

Dead Island is available to buy from Play.com.

HEXUS Right2Reply

At HEXUS, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any company representatives for the products reviewed choose to respond, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.



HEXUS Forums :: 4 Comments

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I've put just over 30hrs into this (PC), very little CO-OP as it dropped constantly so I gave up in the end.

Don't get me wrong its a good game, well worth the £30 I paid but it gets really repetitive, the sewer levels are boring and the bugs…oh the bugs! Even simple things like why do you stand up if you pick up an item while crouching? Madness!

As I said, its good, not what I expected before it was released and not as free roaming (by that I mean there isn't much to explore) as something like Fallout but stil a decent addition to your games catalogue.
30hours? Without co-op?

You got your moneys worth!

Even playing with 3 mates, I find it extremely repetitive to the point where I really can't be bothered doing any of the side quests at all.

I found the bugs to be (for the most part) unobtrusive….my major technical issue is the whole “fish eye” effect I have going on…..
shaithis
30hours? Without co-op?

You got your moneys worth!

Even playing with 3 mates, I find it extremely repetitive to the point where I really can't be bothered doing any of the side quests at all.

I found the bugs to be (for the most part) unobtrusive….my major technical issue is the whole “fish eye” effect I have going on…..

Yeah, maybe two or 3 hours of co-op overall, played with a few ppl from HEXUS but could never go more than 20mins without losing connection. Think I lasted so long as I was playing and going through the motions rather than actually enjoying it.

I completed it then started again but gave up on the second run through after a couple of hours as I got bored. Decided to hang around the beginning waiting for co-op joins and tried to give n00bs some decent weapons (giving a level 2 n00b a 250+ blade elicits much joy!), the flakyness of the connections just made me give up though.
I also ended up playing it on my own after EVERY single attempt at joining or having people join me failed or dropped soon after joining.

I have also NEVER seen a game with so many bugs and I've played BF2 1.0 ;).

That aside (like they were small issues I mentioned above), the game lacked variety, samey objectives, no day / night cycles which is just criminal, the lack of any true survival elements all made the game largely a dull, flat experience.

TheAnimus and I both agreed that the scope of potential for this game was exquistely broad and if done right, Dead Island could have been an absolutely jaw-droppingly epic title and there are plenty of occasions where there were elements of pure genius which were immediately stifled by poor execution or bugs.

In my opinion, using the Chrome 5 engine was a shockingly bad decision, I personally feel that the Unreal 3 engine would have been a MUCH better choice, but to improve gameplay, they could have blended the survival and environmental elements of STALKER, I felt that STALKER 1 and Pripyat are among the most atmospheric and immersive games of recent times.

If the devs had read “The Zombie Survival Guide” by Max Brooks, the players should have been made a lot less powerful and forced a more obvious ethic on teamwork as seen in zombie panic, cut most of the soundtrack and used a semi-realtime soundscape of the zombies instead and environmental sounds, if they made the walkers behave more like zombies so they'd be attracted by any noises that you make or lights that you emit from the use of your flashlight which would make night time sequences all the more hazardous, in which case a sound and light meter could have been implemented which could also help you to avoid being detected by zombies altogether.

Dilemmas such as, “Should I walk to an objective so as to not attract the attention of the zombies or should I stock up on weapons and drive close to the objective and expect to fight off a horde?” would have been brilliant, with similar scenareos associated with the use of firearms over melée weapons.

Small things like NPCs closing doors behind you after you've left to complete a quest would have added an extra sense that you were in a world where people are actually scared of things and are vulnerable.

Building barricades with objects that are nearby would also have added to make for a more immersive experience.

I could go on for ages about what could have been added but the sheer volume of fedex missions really grated me down towards the end, and I very nearly came close to abandoning it, and unsurprisingly I'm largely disappointed by Dead Island but only because of the amount of potential it had.