A Critique of Dead Island

The editors at Gamepron have put together a critique of Dead Island in which they try to analyze the reasons for the game’s success in spite of the problems encountered at launch and the generally lukewarm reviews, while also trying to recognize the game’s merits. Here’s a snip:

Allowing the Player to equip multiple weapons at once is not only a nice touch, but necessary a game has finally managed to make weapon durability a statistic worth taking notice of keeping repair locations to a minimum ensures that any long foray into the zombie infested world will see Players burning through multiple weapons.

But this is where Dead Island runs into problems. Everything in this world everything re-spawns: from basic enemies to boss enemies to health, ammo, and loot: everything. This makes the concept of ‘˜survival’ seem moot, and becomes increasingly frustrating, especially as the zombies level up with you, meaning there is never an .asy’ moment. You’ll never return to town to heal up and sell loot without having to fight your way there. By the same token, you’re never really worried about scrounging parts for your upgrades, because that same bin is going to have a new part in it when you come back in a minute’s time.

Simply stopping everything re-spawning here is not the solution but changing what does and what doesn’t would have been a good start. Stopping boss enemies returning makes life easier for the Player but this can be balanced by stopping every damn chocolate bar and energy drink in the world reappearing infinitely too. Balancing the difficulty would have made the game more rewarding and far less frustrating.

As a brief postcript, I’m not sure if it’s completely fair to compare the sales of Dead Island, a 2011 multi-platform title, with those of Deus Ex, a 2000 PC exclusive (later ported to the PlayStation 2).