I wasn’t expecting much going into “Dead Island;” I mean, it is about zombies. What I wasn’t expecting was for the game to be this bad.
The first hint that this game is no good that I should have picked up on is how it seems to be a rag-tag assortment of other games Frankensteined into one.
Certain elements of “Dead Island” are similar to other games, from gameplay to its aesthetic. One such game is “Borderlands,” right down to the leveling system and the interesting characters that never get explored.
Yes, much like “Borderlands,” “Dead Island” has four interesting characters that ultimately never get developed. “Dead Island” takes it a step further than “Borderlands,” however, by having its characters give a little introduction of them during the start of the game, but from there that’s pretty much it.
Even during the actual cut scenes where they make appearances, the characters don’t even talk. The only times you hear them, is when they give a “yes” or “no” whenever a quest is provided to them, or during combat. It ultimately just feels token and hollow.
It also apparently never occurred to the developers that some of their phrases requesting help or giving advice to allies would sound awkward during single-player mode.
But that’s OK because the game totally makes up for the lack of interesting characters, right? . . . Wrong.
Games involving zombies are notorious for a lack of complex stories. The last big zombie-game franchise to attempt a halfway-decent story was the “Resident Evil” series, which can charitably be called unique and not-so-charitably called idiotic.
I can understand the developer’s decision not to have their cake and eat it too, but for the love of God they could have at least tried for something other than “get off the island.”
The basic premise of staying alive in a zombie game can be a winning formula (games like “Left 4 Dead” and “Dead Rising” showed us that), but this formula only works if it’s backed up by decent gameplay.
The gameplay in “Dead Island” fails on two major parts: the combat and the questing system.
The combat in “Dead Island” is reminiscent of “Condemned” because of the emphasis on melee. This is all well and good, but it means that on average, players will only fight three to five zombies rather than the traditional horde to make up for the fact that you rarely ever use any guns.
Another problem with the combat is that it gets tedious and boring once you find out that almost any zombie can be rendered immobile as long as you keep pressing the kick button. Because you only fight a few zombies at a time, each one of them has been given a ridiculous amount of health. But it’s OK because once you (inevitably) get sick of fighting, you can just run away. Seeing as how at full sprint no zombie can keep up with you, zombie encounters are even less of a threat.
And if you do somehow die, you just re-spawn a few feet away with an insignificant loss of money. All enemies remain in the same state as when you died, making the combat unchallenging.
The biggest fault by far that I found in this game is that it expects to keep players going through its quest system, which is so boring and unchallenging that it makes the combat system feel invigorating by comparison.
The “Dead Island” quest system reminds me a lot of Western RPGs such as “Fallout” and “Oblivion” in that you have a main mission and along the way you get bogged down with a bunch of side missions.
When playing the WRPG’s, there’s always a certain point when I just want to ignore every side mission and focus on the main one to find the resolution; with “Dead Island,” that point was halfway through Chapter One.
Nearly every quest given to you is a fetch quest, all of which are just variations of “go here” and “get this.” It’s fine at first when the emphasis is to survive and you’re trying to get food and supplies, but after a while it just gets ridiculous. At one point you are actually tasked with getting a woman’s teddy bear.
And because this is an open-world game, the only way to get to your next objective is to follow the mini map’s route, which should be straightforward but somehow finds a way of getting under your feet.
This is the type of game in which your objective is down the street, but because a lowly hedge bush is blocking your way, the game will have you drive the opposite direction, through a tunnel, around a mountain and over a bridge to get there. So not only are the quests boring and repetitive, they’re also frustrating to finish.
It’s rare that I play a game in which almost everything goes wrong at once, and considering that this game copied so many elements from other tried and tested games, one would think it could pull it off.
But no, it may have an open, tropical world like “Far Cry” and “Just Cause,” and it may have a fighting system similar to “Condemned,” and it may even try to pull off the “zombie apocalypse” feel evoked by “Left 4 Dead” and “Dead Rising,” but the main difference is that all those games were fun.
