Dead Island

‘That zombie has no nose!’ ‘How does he smell?’ ‘Terrible!’

Overview

I’m not always aware of the hype around games. In the case of Dead Island, I completely missed the clever and heart-breaking trailer that stoked the gaming community. And in many ways I’m glad: that trailer sets an expectation for the game that it simply doesn’t deliver upon.

Dead Island is a survival-horror game, set on the fictional island of Banoi. An epidemic has spread across the island, turning everyone into zombies, except for a few who are immune. Sound familiar? Indeed. There’s absolutely nothing original about the story at all.

You can play one of four survivors, each having slightly different specialisms in their methods of zombie despatch. Logan is an expert in throwing weapons. Xian Mei likes slashing things. Sam B likes smashing stuff up with hammers, while Purna loves her guns. Each character has a backstory, but honestly who cares if they’re here for the vodka or the voodoo? This is about zombie mashing and the flimsy story is quickly forgotten.

Each playable character has different strengths and specialisms. Xian Mei likes sharp blades and is probably the most rounded.

You wake up from a hangover in your hotel room. Stumbling around, you find your way out of the room and into an elevator. It falls out of control and you escape, running through the building pursued by a zombie horde. It’s an odd combination of gameplay and cut-scenes and does a bad job of setting up the tension. The cutscene ends after you’re knocked out.

You wake up again, this time in a hut on the beach. A group of survivors think you’re infected and want to bash in your head. After proving you’re not, you’re invited to pick up a weapon and join Sinamoi, your savour life guard, who’s battling zombies on the beach. You pick up a handy oar, and get your first taste of battle. And it’s a ridiculous blast. Whacking your oar over the head of a shambling undead is not just satisfying, it’s stupidly good fun. OK, you got me: I’m here for this ride, what now?

Sinamoi seems a bit afraid to get his hands dirty and will set you several foolhardy and life-threatening tasks.

Gameplay

The first 20 minutes throws you into the mayhem of this zombie world. Your first task is to find a key to the lifeguard tower that’s in one of the hotel apartment bungalows. Snatching up whatever weapons you can find (oars, chair legs, pipes and old tools), you carve a path through the beach and the hotel grounds. The setting is unusual for a horror game, and the bright sky and lapping seas are an intriguing contrast against the horrors you encounter.

Quests and skills

The game is driven by completing quests. The main story throws lots of these at you and they must all be completed in order to advance the game. There’s also myriad side-quests, optionally presented by random survivors. Most of these quests are ridiculous and incongruous in this dead paradise, but the rewards give you cash and experience which all help your character progress.

The unfortunate effect of so many quests makes the game feel full of padding. Completists will love trying to finish every quest (and there are a few very will hidden easter eggs in there too), but casual players may find this tiresome and unrewarding.

Quests drive the game forward but become tiresome and unrewarding.

Like many RPGs, each character has a skill tree which can be unlocked as you gain experience. You can pump points into survival, combat or fury skills. The first two are self explanatory, and the more you gain, the better you become at fighting and survival. The last category, Fury, is a bonus category that awards special moves and skills to your fighting repertoire. Each character has specific and unique skills here, and it’s about the only area of the game where character selection seems to make any difference.

Scavenge and reward

As you wander the island, you loot items and money from cupboards, corpses, boxes and luggage. Rewards include health and ammo, but it’s mostly random junk that helps make modifications to your weapons. You find crafting tables in “safe” spots where you can fix your weapons and modify/upgrade them (using blueprints that you’ve found or won as quest rewards). To do any of this, you need CASH - cash that you got by looting, or were given as a reward for one of the many quests you undertake.

Wait, what? Why the hell do I need cash to do all this? Who am I paying it to? There’s no-one guarding these crafting tables. Given that I can loot items all over the island, and I get blueprints as quest rewards, why do I ALSO need cash to do anything with them? I should be able to fix and make stuff using what I find, no cash required.

There are some opportunities later in the game to trade with people who will sell you supplies and weapons. But it’s not clear in the early game that this is going to happen, so it’s confusing to understand why I need cash just to fix my broken weapons.

This cash based mechanic seriously undermines the survival horror vibe that I was here to enjoy. It makes no sense in the context of this game world, and would have been better if you just bartered with the people you meet.

Weapons and fighting

Fists and feet are your starting tools, but these won’t get you far and you’ll need to find something better. Early weapons are weak but amusing: you can use oars, bits of wood and even hat-stands to batter your enemies. They make satisfying bone-breaking sounds, but deteriorate quickly. You can fix your weapons, but early on it’s not really worth it. Save your cash and just keep picking up bits of old pipe, wrenches and crow bars to whack those pesky undead.

All fighting decreases your stamina. You have a short stamina bar that shows in the lower half of the screen which depletes as you fight and run. Do too much in one go and you’ll have no energy to continue. Fighting is a continual two-steps-foward one-step-back dance of aggression and defence, and early on you’ll run away more than you fight. Once you skill up a few levels and find some heavier weapons however, the tables are turned in your favour and you will feel more confident in your attacks. The downside here though is that enemies level up along side you. They get smarter and faster, so while your weapons may be better, you’ll never quite have the upper hand for long.

Close quarters combat with mêlée weapons is satisfying but very dangerous.

Fighting in this game is all about close combat with mêlée weapons. You do find guns later, but they are fiddly to use, inaccurate and just not very powerful. You’re much better off learning the thrust-and-parry skills that allow you to lop off heads and limbs. Sickles and knives in the early game make way to katanas and sledgehammers later on. These all have their pros and cons and it takes some time to learn how to use them. But once you’ve mastered them, you can mow your way through crowds of zombies easily.

Perhaps the most fun part of this game is the weapon crafting. Using a combination of scavenged junk, money and a blueprint, you can make astounding weapons that literally slice your enemies apart. You might add electricity, fire or poison effects, or you can add spikes, saw blades and heavy weights. The combinations feel endless and with trial and error you can end up with an awesome arsenal.

The downside of Dead Island’s weapons is that they continually break. You can fix them but it becomes tiresome. Improving your skills does help offset the chance of breakage or reduces the cost of repair, but it’s extremely unsatisfying to have to keep up the maintenance. It would have been nice to reach a level in skill where weapons no longer shatter in the heat of a fight.

Sound and visuals

Dead Island runs on Techland’s Chrome engine. I’d not played a game on this tech before and it’s a bit of a mixed bag. The visuals are good, but lack the clarity and detail of games using the Unreal or Crytek engines. I was able to play on maximum settings with no loss of quality.

There are some gorgeous vistas in this game. Looking out across the sea from a high point, or plunging into the depths of the jungle can yield some stunning views. But they’re all a bit muted and have a strange shiny quality that makes them feel fake. However, good use of sound and music ambience help sell the atmosphere of a dead island paradise and overall it remains reasonably convincing.

Promotional screenshots make the game look great; in reality the visuals can be grimy and indistinct.

Design problems and bugs

I played the game in single player mode, but it’s clear that the game is really designed for co-op online play. And that’s where you realise the devs had no-idea how to fix the single player game in a way that makes sense:

• Every area resets and respawns, so you can continually loot the same items over and over again, destroying the notion of threat and survival. Reset boundaries are also very close together: in some instances you can enter a house, kill the zombie occupants, walk 5 meters outside, then actually hear the zombies in the house all respawn.
• If you drop your best weapon by mistake and have to go back and find it, it will have vanished. That may be a weapon you’ve invested thousands of dollars and upgrades in. One could argue that’s realistic (would you be able to find a lost weapon in a zombie infested area on your return?) but it’s quite unfair on the player. It’s also possible to throw weapons at enemies but if they miss, they can fall straight out of the game world. That’s not only annoying, it’s downright rude.
• If you die while on a quest, you may be relocated right back at a point at the beginning of the quest in a place where you can’t possibly hope to survive.
• You can visibly see areas reset if you come at them from a direction the developers didn’t consider, or out of sequence from the expected main quest line. It’s jarring and spoiled my sense of being immersed in a real world.
• Cutscenes show all four playable characters in the game as if they are working in a team. So you’ve been wandering around for hours on your own and suddenly are shown a cutscene with 3 other people you’ve never seen. It totally destroys any believability.
• One character seems aware of the fragile nature of this game. On entering the jungle she quips “So many bugs!” Quite.

Summary

Dead Island is a peculiar game. It doesn’t quite know what it wants to be. The combination of incompatible mechanics, over the top gore and garish presentation suggest that Techland weren’t quite sure what they were developing. Numerous bugs frustrate and disappoint, and the story is so unoriginal as to be utterly superfluous.

Yet despite these problems, there’s an air of scrappy fun about this game. When your characters have levelled up enough, it becomes enjoyable rather than frustrating, and I can see myself losing a ton of hours mashing up these zombie hordes.

This isn’t a polished game by any means, but it’s on the right side of fun to keep pulling me back for more.