Dead Island [Review]

FULL REVIEW

Note: The internet seemed to be a major factor with the instability, lack of polish as well as the numerous bugs with the launch build of the game, including the fact that a wrong build made it to Steam, and a preorder DLC that never made it. So it seemed fair to wait a bit for the first update to come out for PC before writing the review. This review is based on an updated version of Dead Island.

Missed out on your beach vacation because your annoying boss won’t grant you leave? Do not fear, for Dead Island provides you with a superb beach vacation at the Banoi Resort on a picturesque island off the coast of Papua New Guniea, without even leaving the confines of your trusty PC. There’s one drawback though, its infested with zombies. So you get a beach holiday, with adventure as well as horror and dismemberment as activities not mentioned on the brochure. Not exactly your average Club Mahindra holiday.

A few months before release, Dead Island wowed the world with a fantastic and controversial trailer, that was as brutal as it was emotionally touching and has even inspired Hollywood to do a movie. Set to a beautiful piano playing in the background, the trailer featured a couple being ripped apart as their child turns into a zombie. Dead Island is now here, and the game and story is completely different from the trailer. Instead of playing from the perspective of any of the characters from the trailer, the game is played through the eyes of one of four characters. Very much like Valve’s Left4Dead.

After a drunken night, as shown in a pretty cool intro video, you wake up in your hotel room next morning and find that the exotic sunny Banoi island resort has been overrun by Zombies. Yes, zombies, and not people with weird uneven tans. You also find out that you are immune to the zombification and naturally, you become the perfect candidate to run about Banoi Resort and the Island doing odd jobs and helping out people on the Island as you delve deeper and deeper into the story.

Once you select your character, each with a proficiency in different forms of combat, you’re thrown into the fray. Survival is the name of the game, and in your hand almost anything is a weapon. The first person melee combat is brutal and in your face. There’s nothing more satisfying than swinging a pipe wrench square into a zombies cranium. Flesh and blood flying with a sweet, sickening, crunchy and syrupy connect. The melee is a rush, and you can use both blunt objects to bludgeon or sharp objects like butcher's knives to hack limbs off clean.

You only have access to melee weapons early on in the game. Later in the game you do have access to guns, but then the game just feels like a FPS shooter, and bullets are in short supply, so you always find yourself reaching for that hammer. Just like in real life weapons degrade over use, so you can choose to repair it yourself or upgrade weapons on the various workbenches scattered around. Of course, you also have the option of throwing it at the oncoming zombies and resort to good old fisticuffs as a last resort (pun intended). You can also add in kicks into your combos, which staggers most of the smaller zombies. It’s fun when you can actually kick them in the rear and watch physics do its thing.

The more you fight, solve quests and help people, you gain XP. Like an RPG, you gain new abilities and the game throws higher level zombies at you. The entire island levels up with you. So there’s always a challenge.



A lot of the quests in Dead Island are primarily fetch quests. There are a few interesting ones where you have to clean out certain areas. However, most of the quests are just excuses to get out and kick some decaying ass. Some of the quests require you to actually manually fill up fuel and load them into trucks, or scrounge and scavenge for food and juice. While all of this sounds fantastic, the main story quest lacks that tightness, squandering the perfect resort setting. The characters are flat, and one dimensional in personality and end up feeling like drones. NPCs just order you around, asking you to help them with their dirty work.

As a rule of thumb, if it's a zombie game, the zombies better be awesome. Thankfully, the specimens in Dead Island are A-Grade beach bum zombies. From bermuda-clad holidayers to hot bikini clad women, the zombie models and designs are fantastic. The developers Techland have written a pretty cool damage model, where blunt and sharp weapons effect the zombies differently, stripping off layers and layers of skin and exposing bone with each hit. Smash the elbow bones of a zombie and it loses the use of its arms, but it still keeps coming, his damaged appendages hanging uselessly at its sides. Later, the game throws weirder, larger and more creative specimens at you.



The graphics engine of Dead Island is beautiful and capable of churning out a large open world environment with some beautiful vistas. Every area is different and very well detailed. There are some areas where a lot of elements are repeated causing a bit of deja vu and confusion, however it's just a few areas.  There are scenes that would make a fantastic postcard, yet if you look close enough you spot the stories of death. One scene had a man just standing in a pool holding a dead body. Fantastic. You can drive around the island in first person, which is good for mowing down enemies, but is kind of bumpy and unsettling. However it is the quickest way of getting around the island.

There is a level of unevenness in quality that stands in stark contrast to the realism. The physics engine is top notch as well, yet there’s a lack of polish. Quest selection and levelling up is clunky, and you have to wade through quite a few menus. More than once I received a quest and it wouldn't show up, and the person who gave me the quest keeps asking me about said quest.

Post updating, quite a few of the mission objective and pathing bugs have been fixed with adequate bumps to the framerate. The unevenness in quality is a little less now. The launch build had atrocious vsync issues on good gaming machines which seems to be fixed.

The multiplayer is excellent in Dead Island and is always on. At any point of time when you play, someone can join in your game and help you along. Not only that, you and three of your friends can finish the game together co-op. Though, just making that happen, you have to fool around with the menus a little. Yet, this game is perfect for co-op play and the best way to experience the story. It’s like that song “I get by with a little help from my friends”

Dead Island is far from being a perfect game, it has a lot of problems. Yet there is something about it that draws you to it. The combat system is addictive and a great stress buster. There's a lot of experiences packed in. Soon all those small problems just fade away, show up momentarily and then you bust a zombie's face in with a baseball bat, and all is right with the world again. Definitely worth the buy, just wait until it’s fully patched up before jumping into these waters.