Difficulty:

Easy

Time Spent:

10 to 20 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Grows on you"

I'm going to preface this review by saying I love zombie games. A lot. I've played every Resident: Evil game (multiple playthroughs for each), I love Left 4 Dead, and I just can't get enough undead goodness. When I heard about Dead Island, I was understandably excited. Here we have a brand new IP, doing some creative things in untested waters. Hopes were high that this game would go against convention, and do some really interesting things. And after we saw that awesome CG trailer, I was practically dropping logs in my pants. Sure, I had seen the screenshots and a few gameplay videos, but the trailer made me think there was going to be some epic narrative too, which is a great thing in a game. In short, this game fulfills some of that promise. It does manage to craft a believable and interesting narrative in a jaw-dropping setting, but this game manages to take a few disappointing steps backward in the process.

Let's jump right in. As you probably already know, you select one of four characters that are all taking some kind of vacation on the fictional island resort of Banoi. After a night of crazy partying, you wake up, hungover, in your room in the dark early morning light. Immediately, the game starts delivering on its unique sense of place and setting by slowly letting you meander through the dark hallways, acquainting you with the controls. After a little chase sequence, you wake up in the first quest hub. You grab a weapon and run outside to find.. well... what else? ZOMBIES! The game continues on as an RPG/first-person action game, and you move from place to place mostly doing fetch quests.

So how does the game play? This is really important, because this is kind of a mixed bag for Dead Island. The world is huge and impressively open (think Just Cause 2) and you can pretty much go anywhere from the start. Yes, it's REALLY fun to bash zombies upside the head with seemingly improvised weapons (as well as some killer ones that you can buy- my "debilitating mace" is pretty awesome), but there are other aspects of gameplay that we need to consider. You can jump in a car and mow down zombies. But you can't look behind you to see if you'll smash into anything. Weapons degrade so quickly, there's little reason to invest in them. This can make some parts of the game feel a bit like a slog. There are some parts of the game that seem to have no rhyme or reason to why they're broken at all. For instance, around the pool area near the second quest hub (lifeguard tower), there are bathrooms that are under the pools, and you have to go down some stairs to get down there. Seems simple enough, right? Try getting out. Yes. The stairs PREVENT YOU FROM LEAVING. You can get about halfway up before you f!@cking SLIDE BACK DOWN. It is the most unbelievably broken thing I have ever seen in a game in the last seven or so years.

The audio in the game takes center stage. I play using a 5.1 surround system, and it works beautifully. The sounds of zombies and environmental sounds really give you a sense of place, and adds to the overall feel of the game in a huge way. The voice acting.... meh... not so much. The voice acting is often stilted and lame. You never get attached to any of the characters, and you'll often forget their names as soon as they're offscreen, despite the game's best efforts to inject some kind of emotional content into the game, but it comes of as stilted and a bit phoned-in.

Graphically, the game shines. It looks really great. Most of the time. Now, before I get negative, I have to say that the open world and everything in it is modeled exceptionally well, and it really looks great and believable. Unfortunately, texture pop-in is so bad that you have to be within about 20 feet to see some textures well enough, and there are some graphical hitches that take you out of the mix, like zombies falling through the floor, or zombies' heads spinning on the ground nonstop. Things like this are mostly minor compared to the texture pop-in, but overall, the game looks fine most of the time.

Dead Island turned some heads as it neared completion, and a lot of us thought that this game was going to be the next killer zombie IP. What's truly frustrating about the game isn't that it failed to meet that point, but that it was so close and still failed due to stupid simple things that shouldn't have been in the game at launch. They went so far as to say there would be a day-one patch to fix the issues. Over a week later, that patch hasn't materialized. The game was really close to meeting those expectations, but comes off feeling rushed and incomplete. A few more months (or even a year) in the oven, and this game could have been so much more. But as it stands, we are left with a broken and inexplicably unfinished game that gets a lot of credit for trying so hard and still being pretty fun, despite tragically missing the mark entirely.