This is not a great game, but it is a very funny game. The pre-menu cinematic is legendary. 'Who do You Voodoo, Bitch?' is a bop and it gets stuck in my head every time I play this. The character select has inexplicably-long, DICTATED character bios, so OF COURSE, I chose the one-hit wonder rapper whose mom was a crackhead in "N'awlins". Listening to him read all that had me howling. Throughout the game they really seemed to attempt some pathos in the writing, but it was just goofy. I'd receive a questline from an NPC like, "oh my god, I just watched my family get ripped apart, can you retrieve this highly sentimental item for me" and your character would voice a random affirmation like "COPACETIC". It robs the game of any attempts to move you, but it did make me laugh a lot.

The gameplay loop gets really old after three or four hours, but those first few are really fun and hilarious. All the weapons you find at the beginning are worthless and abundant, so I had a blast throwing them at every zombie I came across. Taking a boat oar and hurling it full-speed at a shambling corpse that would then either ragdoll or explode truly never got old to me. The melee combat is pretty good. It's definitely better than say, Skyrim, but gunplay is terrible. I'd say it somehow managed to be on par with Fallout 3. The only reason that's worth anything at all was because of VATS, but Dead Island has no such compensation. I can't speak for 2011 anymore, but for 2024, the quest variety is inexcusable. It's the worst of the worst. It's either a fetch quest, an escort mission, kill these monsters, or just run all over the map for one reason or another. They definitely went for quantity over quality and it's to the overall detriment of the experience.

The character models are hideous. The faces are hard to look at it and the way they move is something else. I kinda just stared in awe at the NPC I was following on every escort mission. Old man, young woman, tribal man or scientist, they all run hunched and waddling like they just shit themselves. Human emotions and animations are completely stiff and lifeless but, ironically, the undead are far more vibrant and expressive. Decent variety of them too and lots of skin variations on each. I appreciated it.

Some technical problems as well. Caught an Infected T-pose for a second, nbd, but there was a crash that corrupted some save data. The navigation could be spotty as hell and there was some enemy pop-in. A zombie would lunge at the bottom of a ladder and somehow grab me at the top of it.

There were a couple of minor things that annoyed the absolute shit out of me. For some reason, they'll give you cars or trucks to drive where 80% of the windshield is obscured by the sun visor. I wish I could post a picture, it's absolutely ludicrous. The weapon mods were exciting but, again, annoying. An early electric mod would constantly emit this monotone drone over the other effects and music and it made me wonder why they would do that. Why not just a quick crackling sound every once in a while? Why "bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz"?

Dead Island is the definition of a "mid video game". The fact that the Definitive edition is still buggy and ugly should tell you something. That being said, you can find it fairly frequently on sale for like, $3. It's definitely worth that and I definitely had fun, I'm not gonna lie. I wish the platinum wasn't locked behind online multiplayer and the lack of couch co-op was a huge missed opportunity. I can easily picture my buddy and I doing some mindless shit like this for a while and beating eachother senseless with planks.

The most 2011 game of all time. A dark, gritty zombie game packed to the brim with dated immersive mechanics to give a sense of “realism.”

The controls are clunky; you get used to them but it’s like saying you mastered walking in shoes 5 sizes too big. You’re constantly bodyblocked by teammates and are forced to fight tons of enemies in close-quarter hallways. Forced aim-assist makes gunplay near impossible, along with no steady source to find bullets until 2/3rds the way through finishing. The neatest thing to the controls was a dodge jump that isn’t really told to you, it’s super useful for dealing with all the special zombies and different than every other game from the era giving you a little bitch push move just for a little wiggle room.

My biggest issue with this game has always been the RPG-elements, specifically with the weapons. Any time I tried to optimize my loadout, I would get frustrated from investing all my money and resources into my cool baseball bat, only to find the shop just rotated and there’s a new baseball bat that’s way stronger and sinking my money into that, but then 10 minutes of walking outside I found a new baseball bat even stronger. I had to basically put on a blindfold any time I looked at my weapons and throw all my money into a fire pit just to hope I do enough damage to the next zombie I encounter. I’ve always been told “just ignore it” and if that’s really the best response for a game about getting weapons to kill zombies with, then I think there’s a problem. 99% of quests are “go here, grab this, but zombies are in the way” and if finding the way to most optimally kill zombies should be “ignored” then what do you even have left? A mediocre looter-shooter? After a while, our group did missions by running past the zombies and I just thought to myself what’s the point of doing them if the reward is just more resources to kill the zombies that we are skipping? I didn’t complain out loud though, it got the game over with quicker 😎

I feel like most people have fond memories of this game because they could kick the shit out of a zombie with friends; it’s really this games biggest blessing because playing alone will just bore the hell out of you since your only friend is the baseball bat that you’re gonna replace in the next 10 minutes.

Make no mistake, Dead Island can be a fun game, but it is by no means a good game. I originally played this when it came out and I remember having a good time with it, but having played it again after playing Dead Island 2, it’s pretty safe to say that this game is literal poo poo doo doo. However, it is still kinda fun if you allow it to take you for a ride. With that I mean, play this in co-op only. Dead Island is a series that is hard carried by its multiplayer aspects. Without them, this game is a huge slog for a multitude of reasons. It’s got pretty terrible balancing issues, horrible skill trees, horrendous audio, bad traversal, boring quests, and a confusingly shallow plotline that gets made easier to handle with the more friends you play it with.

Every year for my birthday I get a little co-op session going with my friends and this year, Dead Island was the chosen one. With 4 main characters that appear in each cutscene, we needed to play it the way it was meant to be played, with each of us playing as each one. After some convincing, we managed to pull it off. Two of them were ready to rumble, not really knowing what they were getting themselves into, while the third was begging for a sniper to take him out the whole time. I allowed them to pick their characters before choosing my own since I was the one player who had already beaten the game. Somehow I still ended up playing as Xian, who is bananas busted in comparison to the other three characters. For some reason, they decided that each character would be an expert in different combat styles and nothing really else. So while Xian and Sam B. are really good at using sharp and blunt weapons respectively, Purna is better at shooting the guns and Logan is good at…. um.. throwing objects.

While you may think that shooting guns is a good skill to have, this game just does not allow you to obtain a single gun until like 50% of the way into the game. Even then, it’s still extremely hard to find ammo and the guns are unusable most of the time. Blunt and sharp weapons are littered all over the place, and with Xian and Sam’s skill trees favoring damage and critical chance success, they’re easily the two characters that are skewed in favor of having the most fun out of everyone. It’s this initial kneecapping right at the start of the game that would probably taint the perception you’d have playing this game in single-player. Without this knowledge, you might pick either Purna or Logan and then realize you’re in too deep once the going gets going. Logan is actually able to deal some heavy damage with his throws, but my friend ran into this bug constantly where his weapons would just disappear upon impact. He’d be left empty handed more often than not, even with the boomerang skill maxed out. The plus side to multiplayer is that a lot of this ends up not mattering in the slightest. What would be a slog to get through by yourself, immediately becomes a speedrun with friends. The game will throw a big boss at you and the four of you will just beat him to death like a group of cavemen swinging sticks on an animal.

The one thing that multiplayer can’t really save though is the annoying as shit fetch quests that plague every story beat of this game. It’s fine in the beginning when you’re in the resort area, still getting your bearings, but the same fetch quests that John Sinamoi gives you are the same fetch quests that every other character will give you moving forward. “Hey, you four morons, can you please go to the warehouse outside and kill the zombies and grab some gasoline canisters for me pretty please?” No bitch, do it yourself!!! Each act has literally the same mission progression: show up confused, travel across the map multiple times to get supplies for a group of survivors you meet, go on a rescue escort mission, come back to the survivors having been mauled to death while you were gone, leave the area, and rinse and repeat. Two times is okay, but three and four…? It gets pretty monotonous. Dead Island is at its best in the first act, where you’re exploring the resort area. There’s something kind of metal about the whole blood in the sand, sunny beach vibes ruined by zombies that kinda hits different for me. I think at the time of its release, it was the first piece of zombie media to go there as it’s setting and it’s still really cool now, just hitting home how outrageously horrific a zombie outbreak could be while it’s descending on unsuspecting beachgoers on vacation who were having the time of their lives like day ago. Unfortunately, you only spend like a good hour and a half during this portion of the game because the characters eventually leave to these less interesting and gross looking maps afterwards.

Once you hit Act II, the game drops off hard. It’s just these really drab looking sewers, prisons, ugly jungles, and endless hallways that you’re constantly walking back and forth through. Even in the Definitive Edition it all still looks really ugly. It makes the fetch quests stand out even worse as the maps grow larger, you’re having to traverse further for the same quest but with different supplies, forcing you to walk through the sewers more times than legally allowed. The outside traversal will most likely be done by some of the most difficult to drive vehicles as well. You can walk, but it’ll take forever so there’s no point but to give up and just have someone ride that whip into the sunset, over and over again, constantly crashing it into trees and random blockades. There are some horrible oversights that come with this though. The cars only have 4 seats to adapt to the amount of potential players, but the escort missions don’t account for that. You’ll need the NPC to have a seat, which meant that 1 poor schmuck was hauling ass on foot behind us instead. This would be mitigated sometimes by the game allowing the stragglers to fast travel to the other players, but only when a main quest was about to take place, otherwise they’d be left behind. We also ran into this really annoying issue where everyone would body block each other in small hallways, which is definitely bound to happen in the later acts. Someone would just sit in a doorway and AFK as a joke while everyone else was left screaming in the room they were stuck in. You’d open a door to find an explodey zombie and perish because your friends are standing in the way.

Luckily, death is kind of just a suggestion in these games. The great thing about Dead Island is that when you die, you respawn back into the action rather quickly, instead of being sent back to a save from hours ago or having to rewatch the cutscenes. You get a little countdown and then blip back into existence just a short distance away. It’s nice because it allows you the freedom to just full send yourself right into a group of enemies and try again. The only real downside to death is that you lose a percentage of the money you’ve found laying around. There’s unfortunately a currency system in this game and its economy is kind of wild. Money is not hard to find at all, but it is a pain in the ass to lose like $3,000 because you slipped off a cliff. You can use the money to buy new weapons or crafting materials, but you also need it to repair and upgrade them for some reason. The weapon durability varies and some items are expensive as shit to maintain, so to lose a huge chunk of your money is pretty annoying. The game does give you a crap ton of weapons to work with though and you’ll likely be swapping your inventory out every once in a while anyways. This is a system that is just done better in Dead Island 2 though. Modifying the weapons is cool, if only for a moment. Electrifying or combusting the enemies is useful as it keeps them stunned, but the damage can also be self-inflicting. You’ll be swinging on an enemy nutty style, then die because your friend shot it with an explosive fire bullet. It’s just awful how much your co-op partners can get in the way sometimes, and I’m sure playing this with randoms back then was probably a nightmare of endless trolling.

When the four of us finished the game and the sound of Sam B.’s famous “Who do you voodoo, BITCH?” overtook our headphones, I asked them what they thought, only to be met with 10 seconds of raw deafening silence. They didn’t even know what they just witnessed. The gameplay was okay and getting through this with friends was an experience I’m sure we’ll cherish together like a couple of friends sharing survivor’s guilt after an accident, the overall consensus was mass confusion and I don’t really blame them. This game’s “story” is held together with band-aids and chewing gum. The core 4 characters only get shit done because everyone else you run into is extremely stupid, just doing the most moronic things for seemingly zero reason at all. For every dumb thing that happens in this game, there were like 5 smarter alternative solutions you could come up with almost instantaneously, but that’s just how it is on this bitch of an Earth!!! The cutscenes teleport the characters around in ways only magic could pull off, with random moments of tension just ending abruptly. The characters are just unpleasant for the sake of being unpleasant and it tries to be serious the whole time, with nothing injected to give it a bit more life or breathing room. They don’t emote in any way at all, so something will happen and they’ll just kind of look like a deer in the headlights. You know you’re supposed to be upset because the emotional piano music is playing, but Purna’s eyes are looking in two different directions, so the whole thing ends up being funny instead. Now compare all of this to the most clickbait trailer ever and you can see why a lot of people think this game is diarrhea. Dead Island 2 really leaned hard on the comedic aspects that I think worked fairly well for it, but here there is no joy. It’s all “We gotta get out of here!!” impatience at the cost of not giving a shit about anything else going on, which makes meeting all the other characters pointless. Xian is the only character with glimpses of compassion written into her, but there’s a point in the story where a side character gets sexually assaulted off screen and all 4 characters, including Xian, are verbally just like, “Well, if you weren’t such a bozo idiot then this wouldn’t have happened!!” Huh???

It’s a story that does a lot more telling than showing. You’ll appear at an area where everyone was killed by zombies and a lone survivor will just explain to you what happened. You don’t actually see any sort of conflict that is inflicted on anyone aside from the ones in the core 4’s vicinity, so there’s no reason to really care for what happens. Those events are just vessels to shuffle them off to the next area and never see those characters again. Oh, what about the origins of the virus? How’d this even happen? Oh, someone just quickly explains it to you while you escort them and have your dick pounded by an onslaught of zombies. You can’t just show anything, it all has to be explained in the worst way possible so that you don’t even retain anything being said to you anyways. Jin is the only character that follows the party for the majority of the game and is given some weird emotional pseudo-arc, but it all falls flat when she’s just rendered as the game’s sentient storage unit who adds nothing else. She doesn’t help the character’s in any way, shape, or form, and the characters don’t have anything nice to say about her either. It doesn’t help that while escorting her, she bugs out and freezes in place randomly, so you can despise her in that way too!

Speaking of, there are a lot of weird buggy issues with this game. I’m pretty positive that the Definitive Edition fixed a lot of those issues, but there are some that are still prevalent. I remember in the original it was really easy to dupe and glitch the hell out of the damage modifiers on the weapons, and I’m not sure if that’s fixed or not but it was crazy being able to do millions of damage back then. I already mentioned Logan and Jin’s issues, but there were also some problems where zombies would just kinda disappear and then come back, or they’d phase through walls. The most grating issue for me though was that the audio mixing was shitting itself the whole time. For some reason whenever someone shot a gun or landed a critical attack, it would sound like someone played the metal pipe sound effect everytime. I don’t even know how else to describe it, it just sounded like they were hitting metal on metal when it should have been more of a flesh sounding injury. It’s just odd. The game overall looks so much nicer in the definitive edition, but the stand out is still the resort area. That part looks amazing and the rest of the game is just hampered down by some really boring set pieces after that. The original used to have this vaseline filter over the top of it and it was thankfully removed here. It did however come at the cost of removing the paper quests that the NPCs would give you, which I thought added a little charm to this rather charmless game.

I do have to mention though that something about the FOV or general visual is so off in this game too. Specifically when your character is sprinting, the screen becomes filtered and shaky. I had to turn off motion blur and adjust all my other settings because it was making me motion sick, which has never happened to me in a game before. I had to nibble on some snacks while I played to prevent it from ending my life early, so watch out for that if you have a weak stomach for first-person POV games, or just avoid it entirely.

I don’t despise this game at all, in fact I still found a lot of fun with this playthrough. It is just simply not a good game, but I would qualify it as circulating back to the “good kind of bad” in some way. There’s a reason why it’s considered a bit of a cult classic. I can’t in good faith give it a higher rating just because having friends makes it a little less awful though. However, If you’re gonna eat some dog shit, you might as well eat dog shit with some company. And hey! It could have been a lot worse. We could have been playing Dead Island: Riptide instead. Now there’s an idea for next year 🤔.