This game feels like the textbook definition of the phrase “a product of its time”

Dead Island as a premise is interesting, and the execution of the environments and even the overall world design is well made and very fascinating. The actual game on the other hand is not.

This is not a horror game, this is a co-op RPG, complete with experience points, a level up system and enemy stats. You even get damage numbers popping up when you attack enemies. With that said, being a co-op game this would likely be more fun with friends but like Dead Space 3, I don’t have any friends to play with, nor do I have any friends who would voluntarily WANT to play this anyway.

The melee combat is a sight to behold. It starts out kind of ok when you first start up the game but the further you go in, the more unreliable and ham-fisted it becomes. The weapons operate with gun physics meaning you have the potential to be precise with how you aim your weapon but the execution is so broken it’s hard to actually pull it off intentionally. When you factor in multiple infected at a time it’s nearly impossible to deal with them all with how you drunkenly flail your arms around trying desperately to keep them off you. The kick attack is ironically more powerful than actual weapons in many circumstances seeing as how it does a great job at stun-locking infected and it can deal critical damage on grounded enemies. The enemies are your typical zombie fodder but the “bosses” you encounter are beyond frustrating. Not because they’re hard or anything, they’re really not, but because if they so much as lightly tap you on the shoulder you end up spiraling down onto the floor and the game forces you to take a solid minute to awkwardly get back up. You’d be surprised how much this occurs.

There’s also this “fury” ability you get from charging a meter. Activating it feels clunky and unintuitive but it’s essentially an instakill attack you can use on multiple enemies. Nothing to write home about.

The game takes place on a tropical resort complete with giant hotels, pools, beaches and beachside resorts. The atmosphere and setting are great and are super unique compared to most zombie games I played. It also has the benefit of containing an ingenious setup for looting in a zombie apocalypse (the people who vacationed here have brought tons of luggage, and screw it they’re not using any of it, they’re zombies. Loot away).

The world design is also pretty solid. Landmarks are memorable, plenty of ways to traverse the island quickly (even fast travel is offered at designated locations) and there’s a lot of freedom to where you can go and where you can’t.

Being an open world game of course, you get side quests…a lot of them. Side quests are I guess, standard for a kind of game like this, but that’s just what they are: quests to do on the side. Something to do later that supplements the main story. Dead Island’s biggest issue is that…this is all there is. The entire game, and I genuinely mean the ENTIRE GAME is nothing but side quests. Even the main objectives you need to do to advance the story? Treated exactly like side quests, just meaningless busywork to fulfill a certain quota. “Go over to this location to get something then bring it back here. Ok now do the exact same thing with this OTHER object at this OTHER location.” It hardly feels like I’m contributing to anything at all. You pick one of 4 main protagonists, they’re remarkably shallow and pretty stereotypical but outside of their little backstory blurb at the very beginning of the game, that’s all their character gets. No arc, no personality, no anything: they become soulless puppets for you to control and for others to have do their bidding.

Besides combat the other major gameplay addition Dead Island brings to the table is crafting. You collect a bunch of materials scattered around, find bases, find blueprints and you can craft a whole bunch of stuff. I don’t know if this is a hot take personally but outside of Minecraft I genuinely cannot STAND crafting mechanics in games like this. I just feel so overwhelmed with options, most of which I don’t even know if they’re meaningful or useful at all, and I just get assaulted with all this text and menu scrolling that at that point, I just don’t care anymore. I’ll put nails on a bat and call it a day, I’d rather just get new weapons organically through gameplay or find them fully intact lying around. Also weapon durability is here and it’s not necessarily a hinderance seeing as how you can repair them and use them again (I don’t even think they can break) but that just feels like a solution to a made up problem.

With the story side quest filled progression, the awful melee combat, the crafting and constant scavenging, I just could not bring myself to finish this game. It bored me to tears, and while it isn’t the worst game I’ve played by a LONG shot (heck I’ve arguably worse “””horror””” games than this one anyway), why would I continuously subject myself to an experience I completely lost interest in? Just to say I did it? I’d rather play something I would have fun with than be stuck trying to finish this game, and apparently this game goes on for dozens more hours so maybe I made the right choice in that department. Will I ever come back and finish this? Yeah probably, but it won’t be for a very long time.

This game is the epitome of wasted potential. The ideas that were thrown into this story and the concept of the world as a whole is very unique when compared to most other games. I was so invested in the world of this game. It’s clearly inspired by dystopian novels like 1984 and Brave New World(especially this one). However, everything just goes downhill after the great opening section of the game. It just never materialized and put all these good ideas into something meaningful.

I initially played the early access version of this game and was impressed by a lot of the improvements they made along the way. Then when the full game released, it still kinda felt like early access. Performance issues were widespread and the gameplay wasn’t much different.

I can’t emphasize enough the amount of good ideas that were put forth in this game when it comes to its story. As much as I was underwhelmed by how it played out, I was still so intrigued with the world and its characters by the end. There’s a lot to work with here. I can only hope a dev team with a bigger budget can borrow these ideas and create something that this game wanted to do. There is massive potential in the story elements that are in this game.