Dead Island - Tropical Vacation Island Become Chaos - Review

Dead Island sparked the interest of gamers worldwide with a beautifully artistic trailer set to an emotional piano track. As just mentioned, Dead Island is a combination of both FPS combat with tons of RPG style gameplay seamlessly mixed together. To say that Dead Island is Fallout 3 with zombies though would be an oversimplification of what Dead Island brings to the table. The game play videos promised a new and
more realistic way to fight that would require the player to think more strategically about their attacks or die in a zombie swarm.

First, let’s talk combat. Dead Island is played entirely from a first person perspective. Through the use of these items, players must bash their way through zombie attacks. As an open world, zombie apocalypse first person perspective, melee fighter with multiplayer Dead Island provides a very unique combination of many game play elements, used in other games, but it looks like Video Games Market may have bit off more than they could chew with this huge undertaking – as an abundance of bugs ruin a very fun, and visually stunning zombie killing game. The mission structure is pretty basic. Groups of survivors that have holed-up for safety on the island assign the player (or players) tasks such as gathering items, travelling to certain locations, or escorting a NPC to safety. The combat tree revolves around combat bonuses and the survival tree gives players options like additional inventory slots or have items deteriorate at a slower rate.

The game fails to introduce the player to the weapon degradation system and an uninformed player may fight with dulled blade or a broken bat for a long time before realizing that they need to change weapons. Dismembering zombies with home made weapons is extremely satisfying in Dead Island. Knocking zombies down with a kick is useful for crowd control, letting the player take on an enemy at a time, which is preferable. Zombies scale in difficulty as players join, team killing is impossible other than with explosives, and missions can be completed as a team or individually – so issues caused by uncooperative individuals is kept to a minimum. Unfortunately, anger inducing bugs and programming ruin Dead Island. Spawn points after death are chosen poorly – dropping the player into a crowd of zombies or happily (but without any challenge) right next to their objective.

One thing that helps set Dead Island apart from both Dead Rising and the game it was most initially compared to when gameplay was first shown, Left 4 Dead, is that combat is risky at almost every instance. Through kills and completing quests and various challenges, players gain experience and will level up. The Fury tree is specific to either munitions, blunt weapons, sharp weapons or thrown weapons depending on the players initial character choice.

CONCLUSION

Dead Island is a good game that offers a good experience with friends. The gameplay side of Dead Island fairs better with mechanics and elements barrowed from other games to make Dead Island an enjoyable experience. Sadly, Dead Island feels shallow from time to time with standard boring missions, worthless collectibles, a poor challenge, repetitive combat and post-game content. Dead Island's saving grace is its open-world approach, cool custom weapons and fun coop. Nonetheless, Techland created a perfect foundation for a cool, RPG-flavored survival horror game, but forgot to polish it, in addition to providing a dull narrative.

Dead Island Available on Playstation 3 (PS3), Xbox 360 & PC.