[Review] - Dead Island

There are plenty of zombie games, and even more RPGs, but surprisingly few hybrids of the two, not counting RPGs that happen to include zombies somewhere in them. Dead Island essentially plays like Borderlands, as many have aptly pointed out. The game mostly focuses on melee weapons. There are two categories of melee weapons: sharp and blunt, which are good at severing and breaking limbs respectively. The weapons wear down and have to be repaired, but it is possible to upgrade and mod your weapons. Later on you can stick batteries on your weapons with mods to make them cause electric damage, or coat them in poison. You can also throw your weapons at the infected to deal some damage without wearing your weapon down, but I found the idea unappealing later on in the game when all my weapons were very valuable and you can die so easily, regardless of the fact that your thrown weapons should stay where they landed and can't be picked up by co-op partners.

All the usual RPG elements are there. Leveling up and putting points into your skill trees to get more powerful, collecting and selling loot, and so on. Even most of the zombie game tropes are intact, such as the presence of different types of infected, ranging from massive, charging, straight-jacket wearing zombies, to the usual protuberant growth-covered exploding zombies. One thing that was missing that I wish the game did have was armor, or at least some skills to increase your damage resistance. I understand that it's supposed to be a survival game, being about zombies, but dying in two or three hits even at high levels can be very annoying. Fortunately the only penalty for dying is a loss of ten percent of your money. It is also possible to revive co-op partners with med kits to prevent this loss.

Sadly, in terms of story, Dead Island fails as an RPG. The lyric from a song in the game, "Who do you voodoo, bitch?" pretty much sums up the vast emotional depth of the game. Characters are forgettable. Every survivor you meet is a whiny, helpless person who wants you to do something meaningless like retrieve their precious teddy bear (yes, there is actually a quest to get someone's teddy bear, and it's a grown damn woman...) Not all of the sidequests are that ridiculous, but they can be very tedious when you have to walk back and forth through the same areas of the game over and over. You never really feel connected to the story with it's lack of proper depth and presentation. Even the promise of somewhat interesting main characters that you get from the intro and bios during character selection, goes unfulfilled. During the few cutscenes where the playable characters actually have something to say none of their supposed personality shows through. Instead you get gems like "If we don't stick together, we f***ed."

Fortunately, the story, presentation, and inane sidequests are my only major gripe about the game. The game had some major launch issues, such as the wrong version coming out and there being many bugs, but the game has been patched extensively as of this writing, and more patches are certainly on their way. I played the PC version, but I gave the game a whole week before starting to play it properly. This gave it plenty of time to get patched up, and time for me to organize co-op with a friend, making the game much more enjoyable than solo.

Graphically, the game looks pretty good. There are some slight issues such as a very noticeable change from high to low resolution textures at a short distance away that cannot be increased with any PC options, and the face models of any NPC aside from the main characters are utterly atrocious with the way the lighting system casts lines on their faces that make everyone appear over fifty regardless of their age, but the environments often look very beautiful. The nice thing is, the game has a surprisingly varied amount of locales. After every few main quest mission you go to a new area, from the beach, to the city, and even deeper into the island in the jungles. After a while you may not even recognize the game from where you started out on the beach, it feels entirely different as you advance to new areas.

Useless story and some technical issues aside, Dead Island can be a very fun game. I personally didn't have any major issues with how the game worked or a need to use them, but others will attest that the many user mods and tweaks have improved their experience greatly. If you have some friends looking to have a good time in co-op, Dead Island is the perfect game to mess around in. Just don't expect any kind of amazing plot development. With some work on the story though, I think the concept of a zombie RPG has great potential, and Dead Island sets a good example for what kind of cool things can come from crossing genres.