Man, Dead Island is almost a great game.
The environments are what I love the most. Dead Island takes you from a tropical beach resort with its luxury hotel and seaside bungalows, to a ramshackle town, a dense jungle, a research lab, and ultimately a prison. Then Riptide gives you a flooded jungle and and quaint tourist villa. Not only that, you occasionally go through some generally linear indoor areas, like the hotel and the sewers, which are wonderfully dark, scary, and tense.
Although the world is divided up into these discrete chunks, they form a fascinating space to explore, with plenty of alternate paths and beautiful views. The graphics are not perfect but they’re quite good for a 7th gen console game, and the definitive edition provides a nice bump in image quality.
The melee combat is satisfying. Machetes and meat cleavers can chop off limbs, while bats and maces can crunch bones. Modifications allow you to set enemies on fire, electrocute them, or poison them. In the late sections of the game, they start handing out ammo like candy, but unfortunately the gun mechanics don’t feel as good or responsive as the melee.
What’s not so great is the leveling and loot systems. The zombies level up right along with you, so even though you level up, you never really feel stronger. Normal zombies will take around the same number of hits and inflict the same damage to you (percentagewise) no matter what. I honestly hate this kind of frozen treadmill progression in games, because it just feels pointless.
It wasn’t until I got a max-rarity orange weapon with a poison mod that I could start reliably one-shooting the basic enemies. But getting good weapons is a pain in the ass. Weapons have affixes (“puny”, “strong”, “debilitating”), levels, upgrade tiers, and color-coded rarities. So you could have a “puny” Lv. 50 blue diving knife that’s actually more powerful than your “debilitating” Lv. 30 white diving knife. Oh, but you can’t use it yet, because it’s a Level 50 weapon and you’re only Level 45. You can repair and upgrade weapons at crafting stations scattered around the world, but you have to spend obscene amounts of money for the privilege. You have to spend money… to hammer a few nails into a baseball bat… at an unmanned workbench… in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. Just pure immersion-breaking gamey bullshit.
The writing also kinda sucks, but to be fair it does fit with the cheesy zombie movie vibe. The side quests are utterly forgettable, too. On the other hand, I do rather like the voice acting for the main characters, even if they are a little cliched.
But still, it’s fun to play before it gets old.
The environments are what I love the most. Dead Island takes you from a tropical beach resort with its luxury hotel and seaside bungalows, to a ramshackle town, a dense jungle, a research lab, and ultimately a prison. Then Riptide gives you a flooded jungle and and quaint tourist villa. Not only that, you occasionally go through some generally linear indoor areas, like the hotel and the sewers, which are wonderfully dark, scary, and tense.
Although the world is divided up into these discrete chunks, they form a fascinating space to explore, with plenty of alternate paths and beautiful views. The graphics are not perfect but they’re quite good for a 7th gen console game, and the definitive edition provides a nice bump in image quality.
The melee combat is satisfying. Machetes and meat cleavers can chop off limbs, while bats and maces can crunch bones. Modifications allow you to set enemies on fire, electrocute them, or poison them. In the late sections of the game, they start handing out ammo like candy, but unfortunately the gun mechanics don’t feel as good or responsive as the melee.
What’s not so great is the leveling and loot systems. The zombies level up right along with you, so even though you level up, you never really feel stronger. Normal zombies will take around the same number of hits and inflict the same damage to you (percentagewise) no matter what. I honestly hate this kind of frozen treadmill progression in games, because it just feels pointless.
It wasn’t until I got a max-rarity orange weapon with a poison mod that I could start reliably one-shooting the basic enemies. But getting good weapons is a pain in the ass. Weapons have affixes (“puny”, “strong”, “debilitating”), levels, upgrade tiers, and color-coded rarities. So you could have a “puny” Lv. 50 blue diving knife that’s actually more powerful than your “debilitating” Lv. 30 white diving knife. Oh, but you can’t use it yet, because it’s a Level 50 weapon and you’re only Level 45. You can repair and upgrade weapons at crafting stations scattered around the world, but you have to spend obscene amounts of money for the privilege. You have to spend money… to hammer a few nails into a baseball bat… at an unmanned workbench… in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. Just pure immersion-breaking gamey bullshit.
The writing also kinda sucks, but to be fair it does fit with the cheesy zombie movie vibe. The side quests are utterly forgettable, too. On the other hand, I do rather like the voice acting for the main characters, even if they are a little cliched.
But still, it’s fun to play before it gets old.