This is the junkfood of video games. Its cheesy, its simple, its satisfying for a short time. I spent some time acheivement hunting but the amount of playthroughs required for some of them is a bit much for me. Still a good romp if you find it for cheap.
meh
Ain't gon cap it generally is better than dead island 2 but I will say it isn't saying much because dead island 2 is really fuciking bad for how much money it is. The story is only like 25 hours long and that's to do I think everything.
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.
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.
péssimo
The best edition to the game, imo
Dead Island is a game that I have fond memories of from when it was first released back in 2011. Walking around on the beach, killing zombies with paddles and bats, those were the moments that I remembered fondly. I never made it far into the game, as I quickly dropped it in favor of other games around that time, so I've thought for the next 13 years that this game was a great zombie-killing experience. I was immensely mistaken...
To start, I want to talk about the gameplay/movement. For some terrible reason, walking or running around feels like you're sliding on ice. This game has HORRID unresponsive movement and the input lag (I think that is how you describe it?) is so unbearable bad that I had to download this mod just to make the movement tolerable. It's a terrible first impression when just the first few minutes of gameplay make me want to stop playing. I've experienced bizarre glitches and bugs when playing with my friend, such as falling through the floor after getting knocked down by a zombie, suddenly having a huge jump boost, the AI breaking itself and getting stuck on props/zombies, and much more.
The combat is okay-ish at best, with gunplay being completely amateur while melee is slightly enjoyable. Once you get closer to the end of the game, zombies become sponges even when you're at an even level with them, making you slash or bash them plenty of times before they fall over and die. Guns are a complete joke with how piss-poor the aiming and shooting is. Don't ever try to hip-fire in this game, even when you're up close to an enemy, because guaranteed nearly all of your bullets will miss. I found guns to be so useless that I ended up switching back to strictly using melee weapons or even my own fists over the god-awful gun mechanics.
The story is completely forgettable, so much in fact that I cannot remember much of anything aside from the locations I was in. The cutscenes feel so stiff with how the characters move and talk, with their mouths poorly trying to lip-sync to what the dialogue is saying. Every song in this game is basic and boring, aside from the extremely catchy and earworm-worthy song, "Who Do You Voodoo" which is canonically written and sung by in-game character, Sam B. Navigating the locations, especially the Slums, is miserable to experience. Roadblocks, cars, misc. props, with the occasional annoying zombie variants scattered around the roads made for a terrible time.
By the time you get to Act 3, the game becomes an extremely irritating and boring fetch quest where you have to go to X and speak to this person, then go to Y and do this thing for this person, rinse and repeat. In conclusion, Dead Island is a game that shows its age greatly, and its spiritual successor, Dying Light, is a far greater series that plays a million times better than Dead Island and Riptide, leaving this series as a diet version of Dying Light essentially.
To start, I want to talk about the gameplay/movement. For some terrible reason, walking or running around feels like you're sliding on ice. This game has HORRID unresponsive movement and the input lag (I think that is how you describe it?) is so unbearable bad that I had to download this mod just to make the movement tolerable. It's a terrible first impression when just the first few minutes of gameplay make me want to stop playing. I've experienced bizarre glitches and bugs when playing with my friend, such as falling through the floor after getting knocked down by a zombie, suddenly having a huge jump boost, the AI breaking itself and getting stuck on props/zombies, and much more.
The combat is okay-ish at best, with gunplay being completely amateur while melee is slightly enjoyable. Once you get closer to the end of the game, zombies become sponges even when you're at an even level with them, making you slash or bash them plenty of times before they fall over and die. Guns are a complete joke with how piss-poor the aiming and shooting is. Don't ever try to hip-fire in this game, even when you're up close to an enemy, because guaranteed nearly all of your bullets will miss. I found guns to be so useless that I ended up switching back to strictly using melee weapons or even my own fists over the god-awful gun mechanics.
The story is completely forgettable, so much in fact that I cannot remember much of anything aside from the locations I was in. The cutscenes feel so stiff with how the characters move and talk, with their mouths poorly trying to lip-sync to what the dialogue is saying. Every song in this game is basic and boring, aside from the extremely catchy and earworm-worthy song, "Who Do You Voodoo" which is canonically written and sung by in-game character, Sam B. Navigating the locations, especially the Slums, is miserable to experience. Roadblocks, cars, misc. props, with the occasional annoying zombie variants scattered around the roads made for a terrible time.
By the time you get to Act 3, the game becomes an extremely irritating and boring fetch quest where you have to go to X and speak to this person, then go to Y and do this thing for this person, rinse and repeat. In conclusion, Dead Island is a game that shows its age greatly, and its spiritual successor, Dying Light, is a far greater series that plays a million times better than Dead Island and Riptide, leaving this series as a diet version of Dying Light essentially.
bu oyun baska bir sey dostum walla
öncelikle bu oyunu iki kisi deneyimledik gönül isterki dört olsun fakat o dört insanı bulup aynı zamanda toplanıp oyuna girmek biraz zor oluyor dört kisi nasıl olurdu cok merak ettım acıkcası
valla oyun definitive edition olarak cıktı sadece grafikler iyilesti fena degil grafikler sevdim oyunun eski halini de oynamıstım gözüme fena gelmedi grafk olayı ama sadece grafıkler degısmıs defınıtıve edtıon da baska seyler de degısıyor mu bılmıyorum fakat degısse bırkac mekanık falan ıyı olurmus yanı anladın
oyunda sılahları craft etme sılahı cesıtlı aletler aparatlar takıp daha degısık sılaha donusturme ornek beyzbol sopasını testere baglamak falan guzel olay zombıyı kesmek kafasını ucurmak tatmın edıcı ama su sılah olayı cok kotu abıcm sılahlar zaten png gıbı duruyor elde onu gectım sılah ates etme falan cok bos hıssettırıyor sadece sılah hıcbır hıssıyatı yok hıc begnemedım o olayı
gorev olarakta sunu soylıyım son bolumu soylemedım keske oyle sacma bir olayla kapanmasaydı onun harıcınde hıkaye averajdı fakat ıslenısı daha ıyı olabılırdı, mekanlar olarak oyunda hep aynı yerde durmuyosun farklı mekanlara gıdıyosun bı adada baslıyon bı kılıselı esenyurta gıdıyon oradan baska bısı falan o olay guzel farklılık oluyor, 4 tane karakter var secebıldıgın o karakterlerın ozel yeteneklerı var ben loganla oynamıstım sanırım bıcak fırlatan baya op onun furysı onun harıcınde oyun guzeldı araba falan suruyon zombı kesıyon gayet eglencelı bır oyun ama oyuna daha fazla mekanık eklenebılırmıs bıraz zort kalmıs sadece sol tık atıyon zombıye bırde bıcak fırlatıyon tekme atıyon o kadar teskurler bırde oyuna motor ekleseydınız keske abıcım zaten yollar kucuk aracla zor oluyor TESEKURLER ve son olarak epstein adasındaki kadınların vucutlarını nasıl yapmıslar la oyle cok gercekcı duruyor
öncelikle bu oyunu iki kisi deneyimledik gönül isterki dört olsun fakat o dört insanı bulup aynı zamanda toplanıp oyuna girmek biraz zor oluyor dört kisi nasıl olurdu cok merak ettım acıkcası
valla oyun definitive edition olarak cıktı sadece grafikler iyilesti fena degil grafikler sevdim oyunun eski halini de oynamıstım gözüme fena gelmedi grafk olayı ama sadece grafıkler degısmıs defınıtıve edtıon da baska seyler de degısıyor mu bılmıyorum fakat degısse bırkac mekanık falan ıyı olurmus yanı anladın
oyunda sılahları craft etme sılahı cesıtlı aletler aparatlar takıp daha degısık sılaha donusturme ornek beyzbol sopasını testere baglamak falan guzel olay zombıyı kesmek kafasını ucurmak tatmın edıcı ama su sılah olayı cok kotu abıcm sılahlar zaten png gıbı duruyor elde onu gectım sılah ates etme falan cok bos hıssettırıyor sadece sılah hıcbır hıssıyatı yok hıc begnemedım o olayı
gorev olarakta sunu soylıyım son bolumu soylemedım keske oyle sacma bir olayla kapanmasaydı onun harıcınde hıkaye averajdı fakat ıslenısı daha ıyı olabılırdı, mekanlar olarak oyunda hep aynı yerde durmuyosun farklı mekanlara gıdıyosun bı adada baslıyon bı kılıselı esenyurta gıdıyon oradan baska bısı falan o olay guzel farklılık oluyor, 4 tane karakter var secebıldıgın o karakterlerın ozel yeteneklerı var ben loganla oynamıstım sanırım bıcak fırlatan baya op onun furysı onun harıcınde oyun guzeldı araba falan suruyon zombı kesıyon gayet eglencelı bır oyun ama oyuna daha fazla mekanık eklenebılırmıs bıraz zort kalmıs sadece sol tık atıyon zombıye bırde bıcak fırlatıyon tekme atıyon o kadar teskurler bırde oyuna motor ekleseydınız keske abıcım zaten yollar kucuk aracla zor oluyor TESEKURLER ve son olarak epstein adasındaki kadınların vucutlarını nasıl yapmıslar la oyle cok gercekcı duruyor
A história do jogo é mais MORTA que a ILHA.
(Okay primeiro já devo falar que paguei exatos 4 reais no jogo em uma promoção de desconto na Store do Xbox e talvez o jogo deveria ter esse preço realmente).
Dead Island surge ali em meados de 2010/2011 vindo tentar pegar a onda do hype da temática “Zumbis”. Se já não bastasse a temática em si ser um tanto ultrapassada a gameplay e todo o avançar do jogo é o mais puro suco de um jogo datado de Xbox 360.
A história do jogo é superficial num nível absurdo e nada faz muito sentido. Tentam puxar um lado sentimental com a morte ou perda de personagens mas o jogo é tão ruim que não consegue desenvolver minimamente NENHUM PERSONAGEM, logo todo mundo é só um NPC sem nenhum carisma ou relevância.
O avançar da história é uma das coisas mais lineares e chatas que já vi, literalmente uma porrada de missões super parecidas sem nenhuma criatividade ou ligação entre as missões.
De positivo tem que ser destacado a quantidade de armas do jogo e como a mecânica de ataque com facas e armas de fogo sobrevieram bem ao tempo, talvez seja a única coisa do game que envelheceu legal.
Se eu jogasse 11 anos atrás eu acharia bacana…ou talvez não…
PRÓS:
- Mecânica de combate continua divertida.
- Co-Op.
CONTRAS:
- História sem sentido algum.
- Personagens rasos.
- Todo o jogo é muito datado.
- Missões repetitivas e iguais.
(Okay primeiro já devo falar que paguei exatos 4 reais no jogo em uma promoção de desconto na Store do Xbox e talvez o jogo deveria ter esse preço realmente).
Dead Island surge ali em meados de 2010/2011 vindo tentar pegar a onda do hype da temática “Zumbis”. Se já não bastasse a temática em si ser um tanto ultrapassada a gameplay e todo o avançar do jogo é o mais puro suco de um jogo datado de Xbox 360.
A história do jogo é superficial num nível absurdo e nada faz muito sentido. Tentam puxar um lado sentimental com a morte ou perda de personagens mas o jogo é tão ruim que não consegue desenvolver minimamente NENHUM PERSONAGEM, logo todo mundo é só um NPC sem nenhum carisma ou relevância.
O avançar da história é uma das coisas mais lineares e chatas que já vi, literalmente uma porrada de missões super parecidas sem nenhuma criatividade ou ligação entre as missões.
De positivo tem que ser destacado a quantidade de armas do jogo e como a mecânica de ataque com facas e armas de fogo sobrevieram bem ao tempo, talvez seja a única coisa do game que envelheceu legal.
Se eu jogasse 11 anos atrás eu acharia bacana…ou talvez não…
PRÓS:
- Mecânica de combate continua divertida.
- Co-Op.
CONTRAS:
- História sem sentido algum.
- Personagens rasos.
- Todo o jogo é muito datado.
- Missões repetitivas e iguais.
Fun co-op experience. Enjoyable enough.
for 3$ on sale this is good. i would not pay 20$ for it.
graphics shine through sometimes, but shooting is weird and the combat just gets a bit boring in the end since no new mechanics really get introduced. i did, however, like the different areas and the overall atmosphere
story was fun, but not amazing. a bit predictable imo.
overall mindless fun, took me about 10 hours to complete. and chopping heads off zombies never really gets old.
if you're looking for a zombie game, this is a zombie game.
graphics shine through sometimes, but shooting is weird and the combat just gets a bit boring in the end since no new mechanics really get introduced. i did, however, like the different areas and the overall atmosphere
story was fun, but not amazing. a bit predictable imo.
overall mindless fun, took me about 10 hours to complete. and chopping heads off zombies never really gets old.
if you're looking for a zombie game, this is a zombie game.
Um jogo divertido em suas mecânicas, porém facilmente repetitivo e enjoativo, com um enredo muito básico, a história
Apenas esta ali para dar o contexto. Um jogo interessante para quem não tem mais nada para jogar e passar seu tempo.
Apenas esta ali para dar o contexto. Um jogo interessante para quem não tem mais nada para jogar e passar seu tempo.
After playing the original on the 360, I was expecting to enjoy it again. I must have been wearing rose tinted glasses as the 2nd time around was rough. Shocking controls and ugly to look at (even for remaster standards). The game is enjoyable however as it’s pretty hard to mess up first person zombie melee carnage.
100% story completion
Dead Island remains a joyous romp throughout due to its satisfying gameplay loop of visceral combat and player upgrades. Just don’t expect brilliance in any other categories.
Dead Island remains a joyous romp throughout due to its satisfying gameplay loop of visceral combat and player upgrades. Just don’t expect brilliance in any other categories.
meio clunky mas tem muito seu valor
So many fucking bugs and on top of that whoever came up with the idea of losing money when you die i HATE YOU. It would have been fine if i didn't die to countless of bugs, but anyway. Story is go from here to there with barely any character improvement the whole way through.
I like the combat (sometimes) but the zombie gore is pretty shit, humans don't have the same gore as the zombies (I think it was too controversial back when this game first released) And my favorite part was definitely the locations, which were very pretty. My favorite being the resort and the jungle.
Edit (About 3 hours later?) After writing this review i began playing the Ryder Campaign DLC, which i completed in 2 hours and 32 minutes, on the same day as i completed the base game (April 25th). I was hoping Backloggd had a section for the definitive edition of this DLC instead of just the original one, which i won't review because it's not the same game in terms of bugs/graphics and even player models! (same story though). But honestly, this might have been one of the most frustatingly chore filled borefest DLC i've ever played? It's just even worse story telling where you do the same shit as the base game but some how WORSE. With dumb fucking zombies running at you so many of the times its genuinely impossible to focus on what some of the characters are saying or whats even happening on screen. But, i did like when it showed the survivors from the base game and having that small bit of continuity. So the Ryder White's Campaign DLC gets a 1.5/5 stars.
I like the combat (sometimes) but the zombie gore is pretty shit, humans don't have the same gore as the zombies (I think it was too controversial back when this game first released) And my favorite part was definitely the locations, which were very pretty. My favorite being the resort and the jungle.
Edit (About 3 hours later?) After writing this review i began playing the Ryder Campaign DLC, which i completed in 2 hours and 32 minutes, on the same day as i completed the base game (April 25th). I was hoping Backloggd had a section for the definitive edition of this DLC instead of just the original one, which i won't review because it's not the same game in terms of bugs/graphics and even player models! (same story though). But honestly, this might have been one of the most frustatingly chore filled borefest DLC i've ever played? It's just even worse story telling where you do the same shit as the base game but some how WORSE. With dumb fucking zombies running at you so many of the times its genuinely impossible to focus on what some of the characters are saying or whats even happening on screen. But, i did like when it showed the survivors from the base game and having that small bit of continuity. So the Ryder White's Campaign DLC gets a 1.5/5 stars.
Look, Dead Island: Definitive Edition is a good time if you're into mindless zombie-smashing fun. The updated graphics are a huge improvement, and running around a tropical paradise hacking the undead to pieces is always satisfying. The story's garbage, and it gets super grindy after a while, but if you have a few friends to play co-op with and just want to turn your brain off for a bit, it delivers some bloody, chaotic entertainment.
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 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.
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 🤔.
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 🤔.
Que jogo merda, não sei nem como consegui terminar esta porcaria, gameplay chata, história má, sistema de missões chatos e maçantes de entregar/buscar um item de ponto A a ponto B.
Sincerely, the first 4-5 hours are pretty great, the game is pretty graphically, and the combat loop is okay. However, passed that time checkmark, the game become horribly boring with those Fed-Ex quests. Adding to this, the combat loop is starting to get sleepy, doing the same attacks again and again. In 2011, basically when Dying Light didn't existed, this was certainly a hit, a little revolution in the FPS-Zombie genre. but know that the Dying Light game existes, there's basically no point to play the original Dead Island games aside from curiosity. I didn't bought the game with real money ; i used the Xbox Rewards system; i'm not that mad to myself. But i won't reccomand buying the game under 3-2 bucks.
Dead Island shows its age now as combat and traversal proved rather clunky and dated, though visuals still hold up. Story started off as a run of the mill zombie outbreak but got a little crazy when i started fighting tribal gangs in the jungle.
I got it a couple years ago and played it with one of my friends, i remember it being really fun, now we tried to play it again and it felt so LONG and BORING, a couple bugs and overall a not really catchy story, the game is worth trying with one of your friends but I wouldn't get too attached to it, get in when is on a deal
Fun with friends, way more enjoyable than dying light in my opinion. Wacky characters and a cool setting make it an unforgettable experience.
Um jogo com diversos problemas, mas que possui uma boa história. A jogabilidade é mal feita, travada e sem funções básicas de qualquer jogo do gênero. Por muitos momentos eu me encontrei comparando esse jogo com o game Dying Light. por conta de se encaixar na mesma proposta, na qual o Dying light da uma aula para qualquer jogo do gênero. A história é interessante, mesmo com todos os furos nos roteiros. Me diverti, mas vou pensar 2x antes de jogar novamente no futuro.
7/10
7/10
é divertido nas primeiras 4h, mas depois de fazer a mesma coisa 500x fica chato d+
Eu n vejo problema com jogo repetitivo, desde q continue divertido de jogar. Dead island tem um enredo fodase, gunfight horrível, combate mediano e um sistema de crafting q n inova em nada.
Eu n vejo problema com jogo repetitivo, desde q continue divertido de jogar. Dead island tem um enredo fodase, gunfight horrível, combate mediano e um sistema de crafting q n inova em nada.
As I also mention in my log for Riptide, replaying this after a decade mostly makes me wish I was playing Dying Light but I'm still having fun minus the ability to parkour. I mostly replayed the original Dead Island games in 2023 so I could feel reacquainted with that world for Dead Island 2. We'll see just what it has to offer in 2024 when I get to jump in finally.
What a letdown. The visuals are so fun to look at, I love the environments, it fulfills my vacation-in-a-foreign-land-action-horror movie desires, but the controls feel very slippery, the characters and story are worse than cardboard cutouts, the only way to enjoy this game is to play it on mute with your own heavy metal playlist. But then you'll be ripped out of the action by the bullshit cutscenes and the magic is lost. It needed to be more open-world like Deadrising, or GTA where I can choose to play the missions, or just waste some time bashing in the mushy heads of the undead.
What a letdown of a game.
Tonally the game is somber and horrific. I was expecting something a bit more lighthearted (for some reason), but I was pleasantly surprised by how well the atmosphere was handled. The resorts and the Downtown district painted a picture of livelihood before the zombies came. Cars and food carts sprawled out everywhere in the Downtown district while luggage, beer bottles, and beach accessories littered the resort area. The music was tense, the environments were tense, some of those fights were really tense, like dodging Rams in a tight hallway, fighting Punks in a green mist, fighting off a horde of zombies on fire really did wonders for the game.
The game fighting and weapon mechanics were okay as well. Not the best, but serviceable. Melee weapons had durability, but it never felt unmanageable. Stomping enemies heads in and dismantling zombies was pretty fun. The gun ammunition was a tidbit scarce, so you had to reserve ammunition for certain situations. I hint it made for more tense gun battles. You could modify your weapons to give them different attributes and shake up gameplay a bit. You could have melee weapons shock your enemies or give bleed damage to help reduce the wear-and-tear to your durability. The guns, however, could have had more impact or power. The sound the guns made when they were fired was almost negligible. They could generally takedown bigger zombies faster than your melee options and they were much more useful for enemies with guns, but they were never as satisfying to use. Unfortunately, this is not where the problems end. To make matters worse, these are not enough to excuse the game’s problems with everything else. For example, its repetitiveness.
I think I can excuse some of the repetitive things in the game. Overused assets like trash cans, litter, charred bodies and broken down cars are to be expected. No video game is going to have no reused assets. Cutting corners is also prevalent in this game. Interiors of houses looking the same, similar voice actors used all across the board. However, there’s an uglier side to the repetitiveness, and that’s in its missions.
The game’s missions were bloated and, again, repetitive. A big chunk of Act IV is running errands for a man who you will never see again and gives no indication of having any use. You essentially meet him and start doing things for him. Clear out this place, clear out that place. Bye! Most of the story missions feel like this as well. They feel like filler, like the story wouldn’t change a bit if these missions didn’t exist. There is a story mission in Act II in which you must get food for the people in the church. In order to do this, you must go across town, go through the sewers and get to the police station. Fine. You run the gauntlet, you get your supplies and you return to the church. But, uh oh! It seems as if someone from your group got kidnapped and taken to the police station. I think you know where this is going. You are then told to go back to the police station. But wait! The station is still closed off, so you have to go across town and through the sewers all over again. Not fine. I literally just did that.
The story and the writing are not interesting enough to give this game any meaningful credit. The beginning was great when you meet people in a pool of their family’s blood because he killed them before they could kill him. Then there is a man who wants you to take his wife to safety because he’s been bitten and he’s afraid of hurting her. Then there’s the woman who goes back to her father to ultimately end his misery. And then there’s the 28 year-old who is totally inconsolable because she doesn’t have her teddy bear. The story itself isn’t great. You’re on an island, shit hits the fan, you’re contacted by a man who claims to have a way off the island. You do all you can to try to find this man by helping other people who claim they can help you. It’s not the worst thing ever, but it really wasn’t interesting. And the more you think about it the less sense certain things make. Things like “How long has this catastrophe been going on?” You have only been experiencing this for about a day or two, but the tribesmen worship the infected and have called them their warriors for a long time? This island is a popular tourist attraction rife with celebrities and luxuries, at no point before hand has anybody ever seen this?
Speaking of questionable trash in this game, the NPCs and A.I. weren’t anything to call mom about. NPCs are generally never given any time to have any impact on your overall perception of their outcomes…if you even see said outcomes. NPCs are generally just boring or static characters there only to give you errands. NPCs, despite having combat and survival experience, seldom lift a finger to help on escort missions.
Overall, if you want a generic zombie stomper then you could give it a try, but I think I would have to be in a very generous mood to call the game good. And honestly, it has turned me off from trying the other games in the series any time soon. It’s just a terribly, painfully okay game.
Tonally the game is somber and horrific. I was expecting something a bit more lighthearted (for some reason), but I was pleasantly surprised by how well the atmosphere was handled. The resorts and the Downtown district painted a picture of livelihood before the zombies came. Cars and food carts sprawled out everywhere in the Downtown district while luggage, beer bottles, and beach accessories littered the resort area. The music was tense, the environments were tense, some of those fights were really tense, like dodging Rams in a tight hallway, fighting Punks in a green mist, fighting off a horde of zombies on fire really did wonders for the game.
The game fighting and weapon mechanics were okay as well. Not the best, but serviceable. Melee weapons had durability, but it never felt unmanageable. Stomping enemies heads in and dismantling zombies was pretty fun. The gun ammunition was a tidbit scarce, so you had to reserve ammunition for certain situations. I hint it made for more tense gun battles. You could modify your weapons to give them different attributes and shake up gameplay a bit. You could have melee weapons shock your enemies or give bleed damage to help reduce the wear-and-tear to your durability. The guns, however, could have had more impact or power. The sound the guns made when they were fired was almost negligible. They could generally takedown bigger zombies faster than your melee options and they were much more useful for enemies with guns, but they were never as satisfying to use. Unfortunately, this is not where the problems end. To make matters worse, these are not enough to excuse the game’s problems with everything else. For example, its repetitiveness.
I think I can excuse some of the repetitive things in the game. Overused assets like trash cans, litter, charred bodies and broken down cars are to be expected. No video game is going to have no reused assets. Cutting corners is also prevalent in this game. Interiors of houses looking the same, similar voice actors used all across the board. However, there’s an uglier side to the repetitiveness, and that’s in its missions.
The game’s missions were bloated and, again, repetitive. A big chunk of Act IV is running errands for a man who you will never see again and gives no indication of having any use. You essentially meet him and start doing things for him. Clear out this place, clear out that place. Bye! Most of the story missions feel like this as well. They feel like filler, like the story wouldn’t change a bit if these missions didn’t exist. There is a story mission in Act II in which you must get food for the people in the church. In order to do this, you must go across town, go through the sewers and get to the police station. Fine. You run the gauntlet, you get your supplies and you return to the church. But, uh oh! It seems as if someone from your group got kidnapped and taken to the police station. I think you know where this is going. You are then told to go back to the police station. But wait! The station is still closed off, so you have to go across town and through the sewers all over again. Not fine. I literally just did that.
The story and the writing are not interesting enough to give this game any meaningful credit. The beginning was great when you meet people in a pool of their family’s blood because he killed them before they could kill him. Then there is a man who wants you to take his wife to safety because he’s been bitten and he’s afraid of hurting her. Then there’s the woman who goes back to her father to ultimately end his misery. And then there’s the 28 year-old who is totally inconsolable because she doesn’t have her teddy bear. The story itself isn’t great. You’re on an island, shit hits the fan, you’re contacted by a man who claims to have a way off the island. You do all you can to try to find this man by helping other people who claim they can help you. It’s not the worst thing ever, but it really wasn’t interesting. And the more you think about it the less sense certain things make. Things like “How long has this catastrophe been going on?” You have only been experiencing this for about a day or two, but the tribesmen worship the infected and have called them their warriors for a long time? This island is a popular tourist attraction rife with celebrities and luxuries, at no point before hand has anybody ever seen this?
Speaking of questionable trash in this game, the NPCs and A.I. weren’t anything to call mom about. NPCs are generally never given any time to have any impact on your overall perception of their outcomes…if you even see said outcomes. NPCs are generally just boring or static characters there only to give you errands. NPCs, despite having combat and survival experience, seldom lift a finger to help on escort missions.
Overall, if you want a generic zombie stomper then you could give it a try, but I think I would have to be in a very generous mood to call the game good. And honestly, it has turned me off from trying the other games in the series any time soon. It’s just a terribly, painfully okay game.
This review contains spoilers
Dead Island: Definitive Edition is the remaster (2016) to the original game, which was released in 2011 after a wide marketing campaign involving a really sad CGI trailer with a dead child and some tie-in short films and novelizations. I can’t seem to find much about development as it keeps redirecting me back to the development hell of Dead Island 2 so I assume the game went swimmingly for the first part. I had initially missed the whole sad trailer hype so I never really knew what everyone was on about with the game per say, only that I had some buddies who played it and wanted me to join them. I remember first dropping into a 360 lobby with some peeps and a random person gave me a modded (not in game but an actual modded) baseball bat that sent people flying along with an infinite ammo shotgun. Playing the game with these items actually made the game fun but other than playing it with buddies from time to time, I didn’t really remember much of the game other than certain locations popping in my head every once in a while along with Sam B, so I bought the game for other people twice so I could play a coop game with them. The first two times failed because the game was incredibly boring and it didn’t mesh well with the others but third times the charm so shoutout to Brandon, Casey and Asian for the play session, and I'll also say that the Remaster comes with all the OG game's DLC in case you were wondering.
The plot for Dead Island begins as you wake up as one of the four playable characters which include rapper Sam B, American football star Logan Carter, bodyguard Purna Jackson, and Chinese police officer/spy Xian Mei inside of the Royal Palms Resort to find it abandoned and overrun by the undead after a wicked party the previous night before (same mission for everyone though it’s only a solo mission). A voice guides you out of the hotel before you fall unconscious due to another zombie and are rescued by a survivor named Sinamoi and his group. From here, the game mostly consists of helping the survivors move to the nearby Lifeguard Tower, clearing it out of infection. From here, they go on quests for more food and water as well as helping out other survivors trapped around the resort. Before I continue, I wanna warn you that Dead Island isn’t really a super plot heavy game; there are simple goals you follow with lots of downtime periods as you do side quests to level up and get gear. In between the busywork sidequests, you’ll learn that the survivors in the Resort area have been running low on every supply known to man, so it’s up to the main survivors (who seem to be immune), to go get the supplies from the nearby city of Moresby. They break back into the Royal Palms to steal an armored car before bringing it to a mechanic who’ll fortify it up, but only if they bring his daughter Jin along with them as he’s been bitten.
Act II consists of the gang traveling to the city to find food, only to run into a church full of survivors. Defending the church and doing more quests for the survivors there, they learn that more food could be located on the rich side of the city. They trek through the sewers to City Hall and learn that the supermarket has been raided by gangsters. The gang go through and kill the looters before bringing back the food, however the entirety of City Hall has been infected with zombies. They load up the van with the food via the destroyed bridge and make their way back to the church, where Mother Helen tells them that Jin was kidnapped trying to supply the raiders at the police station with food out of naivety. They cut through the entirety of the “Raskol” gang over there and rescue Jin before traveling back to the Resort, where they’re able to get in touch with The Voice once again. The Voice tells them that his name is Ryder White and that his wife is dying, and that in exchange for helping them get rescued, they travel to the jungle to a laboratory where they’ll get a cure for his wife’s infection. They travel through old Japanese bunkers and finally arrive.
Act III has the heroes make their way into the nearby jungle in order to find a smuggler named Mowen, who could bring the five to the laboratory where the cure is as well as the prison later on. Doing favors for the local village leader against the local warlord, they finally meet up with Mowen and he takes them to another lab nearby in the jungle. They meet up with the head of the lab, Dr. Robert West (love the HP Lovecraft reference by the way!) who tells them that in order to create this cure that they need to do his dirty work, and explains that the disease seems to be a strange variant of Kuru, an actual disease that cannibals can acquire. The main piece of dirty work is to find the local natives and gather a tissue sample from a native mummy. Being led by one of these fine cannibal tribesmen, the four kill this guy when he attempts to attack Yerema, the lone survivor. Bringing her back to the lab, they leave her in the hands of the creepy doctor and go to collect gas and other random shit I don’t remember. Eventually after a sad scene where Jin has to put down her undead dad back at the resort, Ryder White tells them to hurry back to the lab as something horrible went down. Traveling back, he was correct as everyone in there is mucho deado. After killing every zombie in the lab, they steal the cure and grab Yerema and head back to Mowen to travel on the boat to the prison.
Act IV consists of the main four, Jin, Yerema and Mowen sailing to the prison island with the cure and meeting up with Titus, the head of the prisoners. In exchange for certain favors, Titus will let them into Block C where Ryder White is supposedly located. Doing quests and leaving the girls in the hands of the prisoners, they eventually get told by Ryder to knock it off and get to them through the sewers. They arrive near White’s location and find Yerema and Jin, who tells them of Mowen’s sacrifice. Zombies raid Titus’s location after an uprising leads to their release, and everyone makes their way up an elevator to escape only to be gassed. After a while, they wake up to find Kevin (who helped them in a previous job in the prison), who tells them that their cure is missing as well as the fact that Ryder plans to escape with Emily and nuke everyone. Making a quick break for the roof, the gang fight Ryder and his mercenaries before cornering him and his strapped zombie wife on the helipad. A tense situation turns even worse when Jin has a meltdown and releases the zombie wife, who bites Ryder before both get shot in the face. Ryder decides to inject himself with the “cure” before it goes wrong and he’s mutated into a worse version of himself. The gang, Kevin and Yerema hop onto a helicopter towards a naval fleet while a news report talks about the outbreak, as well as the prison while mentioning a hacker named “Charon”. This is followed upon in Ryder’s Campaign, where it’s learned that “The Voice” was Charon (aka Kevin) all along, and manipulated Ryder into helping him in exchange for a cure for his wife. Using his connections to a secret organization, he worked with scientists in a lab to weaponize the virus further and manipulated everyone to go along with his plans. I’ll finish this off by saying Ryder’s campaign serves to fill in a couple of gaps and plot holes, though the passage of time compared to the base game is astounding considering how short the DLC is and honestly feels weird in comparison.
Overall, the plot in Dead Island is kind of middling a bit in my opinion. I like certain ideas about it, like the mystery behind The Voice, the potential to bond with and help survivors, the whole virus being a certain strain of Kuru in relation to the native tribes in the jungle, like it has some things I could see being interesting from a realistic perspective. However, I honestly hate to say this but I don't really care. The backstories you get for your main heroes don’t factor in at all to their character development in-game in anyway shape or form, and either you’re decent like Purna or Xian Mei or kind of an a s s like Logan or Sam B (not even an interesting one to be honest). The other characters are forgettable except Ryder White himself and Jin, with the latter just because she's kind of relatively annoying and kind of frustrating with certain story beats. For example, after being told multiple times not to go to the police station because they’re raiders and not nice people, she goes to deliver food anyways because it’s “the right thing to do” and then gets kidnapped for it, like no shit it’s not a good idea but she’s a good samaritan so I can respect the intentions. Getting shot because she released Ryder’s dead wife in the end however? That was just stupid to do, though the rest of it with her being sad I can sort of understand with her experiences. In fact, she’s the only one I do understand because Ryder’s stuff you only really learn in a two hour DLC and even though there’s a twist in there (with him not being the voice), it didn’t feel like much of anything changed anyways from what was presented in the main campaign. Honestly, I barely remember ANYTHING with the main plot because as one review I read put it, it’s basically doing “errands inside of errands inside of other errands” and it just feels boring. If I could compare the main plot of this game to something it would be a DoorDash delivery, because literally that’s kind of all it is. Same with the side quests, there are some interesting ones I sort of remember but not enough that I’d want to spotlight them to be honest, and you kinda need to do these in order to level up while speaking of the gameplay.
The gameplay is not my cup of tea really and here’s why. The game’s mechanics surround itself with a system that we still see even to this day: level based combat. Level based combat can be fine if it’s not monotonous, but here it kind of is. Luckily zombies level up as you level up so it’s not unfair that you’re restricted from certain areas due to you being a level 9 and them being 26 but it’s still frustrating a bit due to the tools you're given. You earn weapons doing quests and pick weapons up off of the ground to use against zombies, and you're encouraged to use resources to mod these weapons (which hilariously enough also requires money, which why? You stuffing dollar bills into your electro sickle?) but if you constantly invest money into these weapons only for an hour or two later to have a better weapon with better stats that makes your old weapon kind of pointless, then why spend the resources to upgrade it in the first place. This is a pattern that kept going on for me throughout the entire game, and at this point it only felt worth it to wait til I was at maximum level to do it. That’s not to say each hero can’t do damage on their own, as each one has their own skill trees depending on the type of person you are. I played as Sam B, who was mainly a bruiser guy and whose skills mainly used heavier blunt weapons. I barely used the heavy weapons cause they always felt like ass but besides the point, you kind of create your own build depending on your skill trees and what you want, and you can’t upgrade everything to the top from what I understand. Purna’s special involves pulling out a gun and guns are her main thing (which you don’t even get an actual gun til’ later in the city so it’s helpful in the resort), Xian Mei has knives and Logan is just projectiles (which feels kind of useless because Xian Mei has knives so if Logan has throwing knives then what’s the point?).
The zombies I’ll start out by saying that I appreciate how much of an actual threat they come off compared to zombies in say Dead Rising. It’s a very strategic game and combat is based off of “how much stamina do you have in your bar” and “this guy is kind of a powerhouse, could I perhaps cripple his legs and make him fall down for some free hits?” and I can appreciate that aspect in relation to the horror the game is based around. Even seeing a giant horde come around and attempt to murder me is scary, but also kind of annoying because it gets into this loop of getting bounced around like a pinball machine before eventually dying and losing a percentage of my money. The more money you have, the more money you lose and it always feels punishing no matter if it’s my fault or if it’s someone else's. As an example, two of my buddies got tired later in the game and started messing with grenades and I got killed multiple times by accident and lost 100 grand out of 160 and that was frustrating as hell to lose all of that. As for actual combat, my experience playing co-op mostly consists of knocking out a few zombies then having to team up with the homies to kill one. I also want to point out here, playing this game in co-op brings the difficulty up a lot, while it’s a lot easier if it’s just you to go solo though that goes with the caveat of not just being spawned in and having to reload constantly due to server stuff. I guess my main point is that while I appreciate the threat of the zombies, I feel like with how the game is balanced and mixed in with the level based combat system it goes from scary to annoying really quick, as I feel like I got cheap deathed (like pushed off a cliff for example) more than anything else, especially with suiciders.
The special infected for the most part are the usual Left 4 Dead inspired ones, like the Suicider echoing the boomer (minus the luring zombies) with the explosions or the Ram’s parallel with the tank as the “heavy guy”. The Butchers seem like the only new one but really they just hit really hard and that’s their gimmick. Between them, the regular zombies mixed in with heavy thug zombies and runner zombies it just kind of feels like they’ve all been done before. In essence, I can understand that it’s hard to create new special infected types and I’ve kinda resigned myself to whatever because I’m not in the game industry but I don’t know. Maybe it’s just the game but it’s all bland, the loop of doing errands, the loot based system, it just hurts my head thinking about it.
The graphics compared to other games were definitely among the hyper realistic-looking games, all the models look okay and you can tell it’s from the 360 era so everyone has a look to it but not enough that it feels life-like. I think the coolest thing graphically is honestly the zombies, specifically the ones that you can cripple and such because of their in-engine system that renders broken bones and peeled flesh which is just horrifying and gives a little bit of uniqueness compared to other games which don’t have as advanced a system. I guess overall, graphically it looks good but even with the “remaster” glow-up it still looks like a 360 game, and plays like one too with the glitches that happen every now and then.
Environmental design for the most part is kind of unique and I can sort of remember most of the places I’ve been too. The Resort is the most memorable with the sandy beaches, the shining sun and the contrast with the zombie outbreak is a pretty cool vibe. The city of course being slummy and dirty due to economic disparities I definitely feel adds to the oppressive atmosphere as well, even though it’s a bit less memorable due to everything looking the same. My issues start to stem however with the jungle, because everything looks the damn same and the layouts aren’t memorable. I know, it’s the jungle so it’s a damn forest and so I suppose that could add to the feeling of isolation, to me it just feels like tiring level design. It gets better when you get to the Lab and the Prison but the game doesn’t really come back from that atmosphere. Also there’s a weird contrast between the sad vibes the game tries to give off compared to the character archetypes and the crazy weapon design you get. The game never made me feel sad or depressed once, or even immersed for that matter. It was just kind of there, and that sucks to be honest.
Voice acting I have the least amount to say about, because the only voice actors I could hear were Phil Lamarr as Sam B and Steven Blum seems to play everyone due to the fact he’s Australian and has a cool voice. There’s Kim Mai Guest as Xian Mei, though I haven’t played Metal Gear so I didn’t know her role as Mei Ling. Soundtrack is kind of okay too, you have the obvious “Who Do You Voodoo, B I T C H?” rap song by Sam B which is cool in a one-hit wonder play every once in a while with your friends gag, and I heard the main menu theme a lot but the game’s soundtrack feels kind of subdued, either sounding really sad to try to hit the atmosphere it doesn’t have or it has some sorta high energy stuff for attacks but nothing really memorable really hit me enough to care to be honest.
My final regards on Dead Island are this: I don’t like this game. I played it as a youth and having played it now, I don’t feel that it aged particularly well in almost any department to be honest. Say what you want about Dying Light’s main plot but other than that it basically improved on the gameplay Dead Island had in every way but better. If I wasn’t playing this with homies (shoutout to Casey, Asian and BFD Survivor) then I honestly wouldn’t have considered playing this at all. Hell, the only reason I did play this game was specifically to coop with people, and the only reason I’d consider touching this again is to play with people. Otherwise it’s sluggish, one note and frustrating while at the same time being monotonous and boring, even though it’s playable and most people seem to like it. As a remaster it’s still kind of glitchy but bearable, I can see the graphical updates and I appreciate them sticking all the DLC into one game so the remaster portion is solid even if the game itself is fundamentally ass. The developers at Techland would make Dead Island: Riptide before splitting apart and going under a new publisher at WB Games, creating Dying Light while the Dead Island franchise went under limbo with numerous bad spinoffs and a development hell for the sequel until it was released earlier this year. One day soon, I’ll play Riptide and maybe Dead Island 2 (if it gets on Steam) with buddies but other than that, I don’t know. If you don’t mind a monotonous gameplay loop with a crafting system that becomes irrelevant after five levels then go for it, but I couldn’t care less.
Links:
https://deadisland.fandom.com/wiki/Dead_Island
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/DeadIsland
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Island
From Steam Reviews: https://steamcommunity.com/id/gamemast15r/recommended/
The plot for Dead Island begins as you wake up as one of the four playable characters which include rapper Sam B, American football star Logan Carter, bodyguard Purna Jackson, and Chinese police officer/spy Xian Mei inside of the Royal Palms Resort to find it abandoned and overrun by the undead after a wicked party the previous night before (same mission for everyone though it’s only a solo mission). A voice guides you out of the hotel before you fall unconscious due to another zombie and are rescued by a survivor named Sinamoi and his group. From here, the game mostly consists of helping the survivors move to the nearby Lifeguard Tower, clearing it out of infection. From here, they go on quests for more food and water as well as helping out other survivors trapped around the resort. Before I continue, I wanna warn you that Dead Island isn’t really a super plot heavy game; there are simple goals you follow with lots of downtime periods as you do side quests to level up and get gear. In between the busywork sidequests, you’ll learn that the survivors in the Resort area have been running low on every supply known to man, so it’s up to the main survivors (who seem to be immune), to go get the supplies from the nearby city of Moresby. They break back into the Royal Palms to steal an armored car before bringing it to a mechanic who’ll fortify it up, but only if they bring his daughter Jin along with them as he’s been bitten.
Act II consists of the gang traveling to the city to find food, only to run into a church full of survivors. Defending the church and doing more quests for the survivors there, they learn that more food could be located on the rich side of the city. They trek through the sewers to City Hall and learn that the supermarket has been raided by gangsters. The gang go through and kill the looters before bringing back the food, however the entirety of City Hall has been infected with zombies. They load up the van with the food via the destroyed bridge and make their way back to the church, where Mother Helen tells them that Jin was kidnapped trying to supply the raiders at the police station with food out of naivety. They cut through the entirety of the “Raskol” gang over there and rescue Jin before traveling back to the Resort, where they’re able to get in touch with The Voice once again. The Voice tells them that his name is Ryder White and that his wife is dying, and that in exchange for helping them get rescued, they travel to the jungle to a laboratory where they’ll get a cure for his wife’s infection. They travel through old Japanese bunkers and finally arrive.
Act III has the heroes make their way into the nearby jungle in order to find a smuggler named Mowen, who could bring the five to the laboratory where the cure is as well as the prison later on. Doing favors for the local village leader against the local warlord, they finally meet up with Mowen and he takes them to another lab nearby in the jungle. They meet up with the head of the lab, Dr. Robert West (love the HP Lovecraft reference by the way!) who tells them that in order to create this cure that they need to do his dirty work, and explains that the disease seems to be a strange variant of Kuru, an actual disease that cannibals can acquire. The main piece of dirty work is to find the local natives and gather a tissue sample from a native mummy. Being led by one of these fine cannibal tribesmen, the four kill this guy when he attempts to attack Yerema, the lone survivor. Bringing her back to the lab, they leave her in the hands of the creepy doctor and go to collect gas and other random shit I don’t remember. Eventually after a sad scene where Jin has to put down her undead dad back at the resort, Ryder White tells them to hurry back to the lab as something horrible went down. Traveling back, he was correct as everyone in there is mucho deado. After killing every zombie in the lab, they steal the cure and grab Yerema and head back to Mowen to travel on the boat to the prison.
Act IV consists of the main four, Jin, Yerema and Mowen sailing to the prison island with the cure and meeting up with Titus, the head of the prisoners. In exchange for certain favors, Titus will let them into Block C where Ryder White is supposedly located. Doing quests and leaving the girls in the hands of the prisoners, they eventually get told by Ryder to knock it off and get to them through the sewers. They arrive near White’s location and find Yerema and Jin, who tells them of Mowen’s sacrifice. Zombies raid Titus’s location after an uprising leads to their release, and everyone makes their way up an elevator to escape only to be gassed. After a while, they wake up to find Kevin (who helped them in a previous job in the prison), who tells them that their cure is missing as well as the fact that Ryder plans to escape with Emily and nuke everyone. Making a quick break for the roof, the gang fight Ryder and his mercenaries before cornering him and his strapped zombie wife on the helipad. A tense situation turns even worse when Jin has a meltdown and releases the zombie wife, who bites Ryder before both get shot in the face. Ryder decides to inject himself with the “cure” before it goes wrong and he’s mutated into a worse version of himself. The gang, Kevin and Yerema hop onto a helicopter towards a naval fleet while a news report talks about the outbreak, as well as the prison while mentioning a hacker named “Charon”. This is followed upon in Ryder’s Campaign, where it’s learned that “The Voice” was Charon (aka Kevin) all along, and manipulated Ryder into helping him in exchange for a cure for his wife. Using his connections to a secret organization, he worked with scientists in a lab to weaponize the virus further and manipulated everyone to go along with his plans. I’ll finish this off by saying Ryder’s campaign serves to fill in a couple of gaps and plot holes, though the passage of time compared to the base game is astounding considering how short the DLC is and honestly feels weird in comparison.
Overall, the plot in Dead Island is kind of middling a bit in my opinion. I like certain ideas about it, like the mystery behind The Voice, the potential to bond with and help survivors, the whole virus being a certain strain of Kuru in relation to the native tribes in the jungle, like it has some things I could see being interesting from a realistic perspective. However, I honestly hate to say this but I don't really care. The backstories you get for your main heroes don’t factor in at all to their character development in-game in anyway shape or form, and either you’re decent like Purna or Xian Mei or kind of an a s s like Logan or Sam B (not even an interesting one to be honest). The other characters are forgettable except Ryder White himself and Jin, with the latter just because she's kind of relatively annoying and kind of frustrating with certain story beats. For example, after being told multiple times not to go to the police station because they’re raiders and not nice people, she goes to deliver food anyways because it’s “the right thing to do” and then gets kidnapped for it, like no shit it’s not a good idea but she’s a good samaritan so I can respect the intentions. Getting shot because she released Ryder’s dead wife in the end however? That was just stupid to do, though the rest of it with her being sad I can sort of understand with her experiences. In fact, she’s the only one I do understand because Ryder’s stuff you only really learn in a two hour DLC and even though there’s a twist in there (with him not being the voice), it didn’t feel like much of anything changed anyways from what was presented in the main campaign. Honestly, I barely remember ANYTHING with the main plot because as one review I read put it, it’s basically doing “errands inside of errands inside of other errands” and it just feels boring. If I could compare the main plot of this game to something it would be a DoorDash delivery, because literally that’s kind of all it is. Same with the side quests, there are some interesting ones I sort of remember but not enough that I’d want to spotlight them to be honest, and you kinda need to do these in order to level up while speaking of the gameplay.
The gameplay is not my cup of tea really and here’s why. The game’s mechanics surround itself with a system that we still see even to this day: level based combat. Level based combat can be fine if it’s not monotonous, but here it kind of is. Luckily zombies level up as you level up so it’s not unfair that you’re restricted from certain areas due to you being a level 9 and them being 26 but it’s still frustrating a bit due to the tools you're given. You earn weapons doing quests and pick weapons up off of the ground to use against zombies, and you're encouraged to use resources to mod these weapons (which hilariously enough also requires money, which why? You stuffing dollar bills into your electro sickle?) but if you constantly invest money into these weapons only for an hour or two later to have a better weapon with better stats that makes your old weapon kind of pointless, then why spend the resources to upgrade it in the first place. This is a pattern that kept going on for me throughout the entire game, and at this point it only felt worth it to wait til I was at maximum level to do it. That’s not to say each hero can’t do damage on their own, as each one has their own skill trees depending on the type of person you are. I played as Sam B, who was mainly a bruiser guy and whose skills mainly used heavier blunt weapons. I barely used the heavy weapons cause they always felt like ass but besides the point, you kind of create your own build depending on your skill trees and what you want, and you can’t upgrade everything to the top from what I understand. Purna’s special involves pulling out a gun and guns are her main thing (which you don’t even get an actual gun til’ later in the city so it’s helpful in the resort), Xian Mei has knives and Logan is just projectiles (which feels kind of useless because Xian Mei has knives so if Logan has throwing knives then what’s the point?).
The zombies I’ll start out by saying that I appreciate how much of an actual threat they come off compared to zombies in say Dead Rising. It’s a very strategic game and combat is based off of “how much stamina do you have in your bar” and “this guy is kind of a powerhouse, could I perhaps cripple his legs and make him fall down for some free hits?” and I can appreciate that aspect in relation to the horror the game is based around. Even seeing a giant horde come around and attempt to murder me is scary, but also kind of annoying because it gets into this loop of getting bounced around like a pinball machine before eventually dying and losing a percentage of my money. The more money you have, the more money you lose and it always feels punishing no matter if it’s my fault or if it’s someone else's. As an example, two of my buddies got tired later in the game and started messing with grenades and I got killed multiple times by accident and lost 100 grand out of 160 and that was frustrating as hell to lose all of that. As for actual combat, my experience playing co-op mostly consists of knocking out a few zombies then having to team up with the homies to kill one. I also want to point out here, playing this game in co-op brings the difficulty up a lot, while it’s a lot easier if it’s just you to go solo though that goes with the caveat of not just being spawned in and having to reload constantly due to server stuff. I guess my main point is that while I appreciate the threat of the zombies, I feel like with how the game is balanced and mixed in with the level based combat system it goes from scary to annoying really quick, as I feel like I got cheap deathed (like pushed off a cliff for example) more than anything else, especially with suiciders.
The special infected for the most part are the usual Left 4 Dead inspired ones, like the Suicider echoing the boomer (minus the luring zombies) with the explosions or the Ram’s parallel with the tank as the “heavy guy”. The Butchers seem like the only new one but really they just hit really hard and that’s their gimmick. Between them, the regular zombies mixed in with heavy thug zombies and runner zombies it just kind of feels like they’ve all been done before. In essence, I can understand that it’s hard to create new special infected types and I’ve kinda resigned myself to whatever because I’m not in the game industry but I don’t know. Maybe it’s just the game but it’s all bland, the loop of doing errands, the loot based system, it just hurts my head thinking about it.
The graphics compared to other games were definitely among the hyper realistic-looking games, all the models look okay and you can tell it’s from the 360 era so everyone has a look to it but not enough that it feels life-like. I think the coolest thing graphically is honestly the zombies, specifically the ones that you can cripple and such because of their in-engine system that renders broken bones and peeled flesh which is just horrifying and gives a little bit of uniqueness compared to other games which don’t have as advanced a system. I guess overall, graphically it looks good but even with the “remaster” glow-up it still looks like a 360 game, and plays like one too with the glitches that happen every now and then.
Environmental design for the most part is kind of unique and I can sort of remember most of the places I’ve been too. The Resort is the most memorable with the sandy beaches, the shining sun and the contrast with the zombie outbreak is a pretty cool vibe. The city of course being slummy and dirty due to economic disparities I definitely feel adds to the oppressive atmosphere as well, even though it’s a bit less memorable due to everything looking the same. My issues start to stem however with the jungle, because everything looks the damn same and the layouts aren’t memorable. I know, it’s the jungle so it’s a damn forest and so I suppose that could add to the feeling of isolation, to me it just feels like tiring level design. It gets better when you get to the Lab and the Prison but the game doesn’t really come back from that atmosphere. Also there’s a weird contrast between the sad vibes the game tries to give off compared to the character archetypes and the crazy weapon design you get. The game never made me feel sad or depressed once, or even immersed for that matter. It was just kind of there, and that sucks to be honest.
Voice acting I have the least amount to say about, because the only voice actors I could hear were Phil Lamarr as Sam B and Steven Blum seems to play everyone due to the fact he’s Australian and has a cool voice. There’s Kim Mai Guest as Xian Mei, though I haven’t played Metal Gear so I didn’t know her role as Mei Ling. Soundtrack is kind of okay too, you have the obvious “Who Do You Voodoo, B I T C H?” rap song by Sam B which is cool in a one-hit wonder play every once in a while with your friends gag, and I heard the main menu theme a lot but the game’s soundtrack feels kind of subdued, either sounding really sad to try to hit the atmosphere it doesn’t have or it has some sorta high energy stuff for attacks but nothing really memorable really hit me enough to care to be honest.
My final regards on Dead Island are this: I don’t like this game. I played it as a youth and having played it now, I don’t feel that it aged particularly well in almost any department to be honest. Say what you want about Dying Light’s main plot but other than that it basically improved on the gameplay Dead Island had in every way but better. If I wasn’t playing this with homies (shoutout to Casey, Asian and BFD Survivor) then I honestly wouldn’t have considered playing this at all. Hell, the only reason I did play this game was specifically to coop with people, and the only reason I’d consider touching this again is to play with people. Otherwise it’s sluggish, one note and frustrating while at the same time being monotonous and boring, even though it’s playable and most people seem to like it. As a remaster it’s still kind of glitchy but bearable, I can see the graphical updates and I appreciate them sticking all the DLC into one game so the remaster portion is solid even if the game itself is fundamentally ass. The developers at Techland would make Dead Island: Riptide before splitting apart and going under a new publisher at WB Games, creating Dying Light while the Dead Island franchise went under limbo with numerous bad spinoffs and a development hell for the sequel until it was released earlier this year. One day soon, I’ll play Riptide and maybe Dead Island 2 (if it gets on Steam) with buddies but other than that, I don’t know. If you don’t mind a monotonous gameplay loop with a crafting system that becomes irrelevant after five levels then go for it, but I couldn’t care less.
Links:
https://deadisland.fandom.com/wiki/Dead_Island
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/DeadIsland
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Island
From Steam Reviews: https://steamcommunity.com/id/gamemast15r/recommended/