Dead Island Previews

A few new previews for Deep Silver and Techland’s zombie-themed open-world hack’n’slash Dead Island have surfaced, and we round them up for your perusal.

Computer and Videogames describes it as “Fallout 3 with a glass of martini in its hand and a bloody canoe paddle in the other” and wonders if it can be “the thinking man’s zombie game” in their brief piece:

We’ve played two lengthy segments of the game now. The first saw us running around the resort trying to find a hotel security card, accepting a host of “come and save me from having my brains eaten” side quests along the way.

The other took us to the fringes of the island resort and charged us with driving a rickety RUV along a maze of dusty backroads, in a segment that’s best described as Far Cry gone survival horror. The vehicle is hard to drive. We crashed it five times.

Then it broke down. Within seconds we were set upon by zombies. All of which would be fine if we had a gun, but since we didn’t, we had to rely on a rusty butterknife to fend them off. This sort of melee combat is incredibly important to Dead Island, which, if you’ve ever watched a George A Romero film, is much how these things are always have supposed to have been (see also: early Resident Evil games).

The Sixth Axis dislikes the way side-quests are handled and notices some iffy animations, but otherwise thinks the game has potential:

The titular island, then, is an unknown period of time into some kind of infection. For reasons that’ll no doubt emerge during the later reaches of the plot (our build times out after an hour) your character’s immune to the disease but most of the inhabitants and holiday makers aren’t, turning them into nasty, relentless zombies. This, as you’d imagine, stacks the odds unfairly against you, although you’ll encounter pockets of survivors along the way, starting with a burly lifeguard and his newly rescued buddies that form the game’s first hub of missions.

It’s here that Dead Island starts to show what it’s made of, and it’s not always as refined as we’d have liked. The tasks, which are assigned a difficulty level and a reward (normally cash and a new weapon) are presented via a slip of paper from the assigner, but still manage to feel at odds with the otherwise rather free-flowing, open nature of the game. You can quickly amass a stack of rather trivial missions to do, making the game feel like a series of to and fro requests rather than an open world one, especially as some of the early ones do little to move the exposition onwards.

Thankfully, the missions that do count are rather enjoyable, and during our time with the game at least connect nicely with the storyline. We’re used to all this, of course side quests and subplots are genre staples and it’s obvious that the developers wanted to give the player freedom enough to play the game at their own pace, but a good chunk of the first round of tasks feel a little bit too much like filler and we’d be disappointed if the rest of Dead Island played out the same way. Naturally most of them are optional, although it’s not always evident which ones are required until they’re completed.

And finally, Digital Spy seems to have enjoyed their hands-on time with the game:

Back in the hut, a mysterious voice over the radio suggests that everyone make their way to a lifeguard building located further down the beach, and it’s at this point that Dead Island begins proper. While your first quest is to retrieve a security card from a nearby apartment, you’re free to explore the resort area at your own leisure, pillaging items and cracking zombie skulls. The beach directly outside is open, spacious and fairly safe, but the resort’s layout becomes more complex and niche-ridden as you make your way further inland amongst the apartments, making the chances of a surprise zombie attack more likely. Dead Island offers a good contrast between bright, open outdoor areas to the dark and claustrophobic indoors that require a far more careful approach when exploring, as well as the chance to discover more more cash, weapon components and audio logs.

Another key factor to combat and progression is that weapons degrade over time, and break within a handful of attacks, requiring you to constantly pick up new blunt objects – from boat oars to iron piping and hammers – to keep in your possession in case you run short, something which happened several times during our short playthrough. While it sounds frustrating having to constantly be on the look out for new weaponry (and could well do over the course of the game) it made for a more tense and involving experience, providing little choice but to sprint past a pack of zombies in the desperate hope I’d find something to fend them off with just round the next corner. In that regard, at times Dead Island feels far more survival-oriented than many of its zombie-filled contemporaries.