Dead Island

2011-09-22

Dead Island was one of the games that I really was looking up to. It all started with the cinematic trailer. It gave the zombie apocalypse a human touch; these are real families that are torn apart. It was a hart shattering experience, that made you mad at those zombies!

As Yahtzee very nicely pointed out, there is actually no use in getting hyped up in a game. So I laid back and waited, without much aspirations and now the game is out. I am not fully through the game, but here is what I think about it.

The first thing that sinks in on you is the atmosphere. Allot of effort was done to get the tome right, a paradise ravaged by zombies. But somehow the tone feels slightly off. The first issue that comes to mind is the game mechanics. Picture that, you wake up confused, the hotel speakers shrill something about evacuation, you see blood and dead people everywhere; and the first thing you do is loot other peoples baggages. This is not helped much with helpful icons on them advertising their usability.

The game really fails the mark of the tragic tone set by the trailer. Sure, you need to help out people that have lost someone or got separated, but is all just amounts to a glorious fetch quest. For once the voice acting is quite good, too bad the facial impressions don't reflect that.

Mechanically the game fairs quite well, the world is huge and realistic and the combat is quite satisfying. The focus on a real world limits your options to bias melee weapons, but it all works out.

What I find annoying is the leveling mechanic. Over time you level up gaining the ability to deal more damage. To keep the playing field level the world levels with you, that is the enemies and weapons have better and better stats. What really gets to me is that this downgrades existing weapons so you need to keep on picking up new and better weapons. But the weapons are not really better, they just have better stats. For example the "Flimsy Kitchen Knife" you just picked up is way better than the "Flimsy Kitchen Knife" you picked up 5 levels ago.

The next issue I have are the quests. But they all are some variation on a fetch quest, like you are the only person able to do anything except cowering in a safe location. In that respect the world seams static; even though some people are talking about being "proactive" or "building a fortification" they just stand around doing nothing.

Graphically the world looks quite nice. It really adds to the realism of everything. This makes is the more immersion breaker when something goes wrong. The world is littered with debris and misc items, but most of them are not physics enabled. For reference surfboards are normally made from resin, they break when you drop them on a hard surface while carying...

All in all Dead Island is a fun game to play, though not a perfect one.