Dead Island takes place on the fictional, tropical resort island of Banoi. Similar to other, real-life resort islands, the glitz and glamor of Banoi's island hotel and resort are in stark contrast to the island natives' actual dwellings. Run-down shanty towns and crumbling building facades await any vacationers who venture off the resort's grounds. Dense jungle surrounds all else on the island, making for an interesting hike. Unfortunately, the jungle's prowling animals aren't the biggest danger in the trees, as smugglers and pirates use the jungle's cover as their haven.
The game begins as you awaken in your hotel room after a night of partying. The power seems to be out, and for some reason you have a bad feeling that all is not well. After making your way to the hallway you start to notice that things are out of place, suggesting a struggle. As you continue toward the staircase, you begin to see splotches of blood on the carpet and what appear to be bloody hand prints on walls and doors. By now you know something is up. You finally make your way down the staircase (after nervously stepping around the dead body of a woman who appears to have been mauled by an animal), and see an attendant standing behind the hotel's main desk. Relieved, you approach her asking what is going on and telling her about the poor woman in the stairwell. As you get closer, you notice that the woman is standing with her back to you, you walk up to her and put your hand on her shoulder to get her attention. Suddenly, the woman whips around and stares you in the face, skin loosely hanging from her forehead, a lip completely gone exposing her jawbone and teeth, blood all over her shirt, and pale, dead eyes. Before you can reel back in surprise, the woman sinks her teeth into your arm. In shock you bash the woman's face with your free hand and back away. Suddenly you realize that there are more of these monsters in the room with you and you struggle to escape the building. You run outside and shut the door behind you, taking a moment to catch your breath. When you finally stand fully up once more, you turn just in time to see the flat end of an oar flying directly into your face. Everything goes dark.
You awaken in what appears to be a beach hut. You are surrounded by others who continuously exclaim their surprise that you are still alive and not one of "them". Once your head clears, you learn from the others that you were mistakenly attacked, as they thought that you were one of the creatures. One of the men, apparently a doctor, explains that you seem to be immune to whatever causes people to turn into the monsters, since you were bitten, but show no signs of the infection. It is quickly decided that you are the group's only hope of survival and you set out to find help for the group. You grab a nearby oar to use as a weapon (since you now have personal knowledge of how much they can hurt), and set out to find supplies. So begins Dead Island.
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| Row row row your boat, roughly through his spleen! |
Dramatic opening now finished, Dead Island tells the story of one of 4 heroes as he or she works his or her way across the island attempting to help survivors. At first this help involves collecting supplies, though the tasks change throughout the game, eventually working towards getting all the survivors off of the island. The majority of the game is spent doing tasks for individuals such as retrieving a prized necklace from a hotel room, or finding a relative.
When you first start the game, you are given a choice between four different characters to play as. Each character has his or her own special talents. While Dead Island is definitely an Action game, certain RPG elements have been included, such as skill trees for each character. Experience points are awarded to the player for completing quests and defeating enemies. Eventually, the player's character will level up, increasing health and giving you a point to allocate into your character's skill tree. Skills can affect anything ranging from efficiency with certain weapon types, to modifying your special "Rage" moves which allow you to go into a kill frenzy.
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| Hmm, who looks to be the least tasty? That's the one I want to play as! |
Dead Island's Banoi island is an open world to explore freely. The game offers three main areas, the resort, the city, and the jungle, to explore. While not all areas are open right at the get-go, the player eventually gains the ability to travel freely between them. Not that the three areas aren't massive and full of things to find on their own. Each map has lots to explore. I spent the majority of my time with Dead Island doing side-quests and exploring the zombie-infested island.
While exploring, players can find many different items that can be used as weapons. Dead Island uses a loot system similar to other Action RPGs with different gradations of power being signified by different colors in the title of weapons. Items can be found on the ground, or in special weapons lockers hidden throughout the island. The game mostly features melee weapons, though some firearms and grenade type weapons are available as well. It quickly becomes clear, however, that melee weapons are the way to go when fighting the undead.
Weapons all have durability which decreases as they are used. Workbenches are spread throughout the island which allow you to repair, upgrade, and even customize your weapons. Weapon mod blueprints can be awarded through completing quests, or can be found on the island. These mods allow you to customize your weapons and create some extremely effective zombie-destroying tools such as electrified machetes and nail-embedded bats.
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| Nailed it! |
The game uses a unique control scheme when battling the undead. We all know that when it comes to zombies, targeting certain areas of the body with attacks is extremely important. Dead Island makes this possible by having your aiming cross-hairs stick slightly to the limbs or head of a zombie when you look at them so that you can lop off their arms or bash their heads accordingly. This aiming system can be tricky at first, but I found it to be very useful once I got used to it. If you want to make things even more precise, you can enable the analog attack mode. In this mode your weapon is controlled by the left analog stick while holding an attack button. If you want to chop vertically in this mode for example, you first move the stick in the up position and then quickly bring it downwards. I could definitely appreciate the use of this mode, but honestly the aiming and working of my weapon was a bit much for me to think about in the chaos of the horde.
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| Fact: Plumbers are a zombie's natural enemy. |
Dead Island does a great job of making the zombies dangerous. When I first began playing I would take on one zombie at a time and inevitably walk away unharmed, feeling awesome. I then started to encounter groups of two zombies and quickly realized that I needed to be much more careful with them. Finally, running into groups of three or more of these monsters quickly taught me that sometimes running away is the best option, and that's just with the normal zombie types. The game features multiple "special" zombie types with their own attacks and weaknesses which will force players to re-examine their strategies.
I found that playing Dead Island was almost tiring due to the amount of things you have to think about in order to successfully survive. Constant awareness of your surroundings is important, as it's ever so easy to get too into taking a hammer to a zed's face and forget that three more monsters are coming up behind you and be mauled. It's also important to find and memorize where health pickups and strategic defense points can be found. Add in the focus on aiming for a specific area of a zombie's body and there's a LOT going on in your mind as you play the game. That may sound rough to some people, but I loved it. It really brings out the survival aspect of the game.
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| Looks like someone needs to visit the doctor... |
Dead Island looks and sounds fantastic. The island's turquoise waters and vibrant jungle landscape make for an interesting backdrop for hell walking on earth. The game's graphics are some of the best I've seen lately, though some of the character models leave much to be desired. Strange facial issues such as eyeballs clipping through eyelids and faces moving in unnatural ways can become very distracting. The environments look great, however. I was probably most impressed by the game's shadows. Quite often as I would run toward an enemy swinging my weapon I would notice how cool my shadow looked at it attacked the shadow of the zombie.
The game's sound is top notch as well. Each impact of weapon on zombie comes with an audible thud that makes the impact that much more visceral. The haunting screams and heavy breathing of the monsters around you keep you constantly looking behind you, trying to predict from where the next attack will come.
What makes Dead Island just that much better is the fact that the entire game is built to be played cooperatively online by 4 players at the same time. Games can be hosted or joined by the player to meet up with other zombie slayers online. Unfortunately, this multiplayer focus makes for some awkward problems when playing the game solely as single player (you can start closed, single player games if you don't want to be joined by others).
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| Luckily, in multiplayer you can blame everyone else for your stupid mistakes. |
As Dead Island was built with a focus on being played by four people at the same time, nearly all story cutscenes feature each of the four main characters. This can be extremely odd when playing by yourself, as suddenly you're with a group of people in a scene that you have never encountered. This, and the fact that NPCs in the game will often refer to you as "you four", make playing solo kind of strange. Another problem with the game being built for 4 players is that the game can get extremely hard for just one person. As I previously mentioned, the zombies get more and more scary the bigger their numbers grow. This wouldn't be as much of a problem for four people as it was for me playing solo (imagine instead of four in that picture up there that it's just one person versus all those zombies with just a knife, yeah, scary).
The game also has some other strange bugs that bring it down a bit such as the ability of inanimate objects to kill your character. Personally, I met my demise at the "hands" of: a door when it closed on me, a box when I fell between it and a wall, a car door when it opened on me, and even the edge of a building when I fell slightly off the roof and into the wall. These deaths can be frustrating, though the death penalty in the game is merely a percentage loss of your money, so it's not as bad as it could be. Other than these bugs, there are a number of graphical glitches which I most often found much more amusing than annoying.
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| Or, you know, HORRIFYING! |
I really had a great time playing Dead Island, even with all of its little imperfections. I honestly feel as though this is one of the best zombie games ever made. I love how the game forces you to constantly be aware of your surroundings and to work to survive. Even though the game's story and characters often seem quite weak, the focus of the game is clearly on finding new weapons and using them to thin the zombie population of Banoi. The inclusion of multiplayer really adds to the replayability of the game, making Banoi a sandbox for you and your friends to play in. While the annoying glitches and bugs can take away from the game's enjoyment, Dead Island comes out as much more good than bad.
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