While it does seem a little light on the RPG elements, Techland and Deep Silver’s Dead Island is undoubtedly an interesting title, and we’ve rounded up four new previews for the open world zombie game for your perusal.
Videogamer calls the core action “wonky”:
It’s a great concept for an action RPG, but as soon as you start playing a new horror comes to light: bewilderingly clumsy handling. Your survivor’s awkward movement suggest that their arms and legs have been heavily anaesthetised. Even basic navigation seems problematic, and if you attempt a melee strike your weapon of choice will flap across the screen in an ungainly swipe.
I’m not sure if this is a deliberate affectation on the part of developer Techland, but it’s certainly off-putting. Tilt your gaze downwards and you’ll see your legs – a rare feature for an FPS game – and yet your feet skitter across the scenery as if they’re barely touching the ground. More worryingly, it seems hard to judge when an enemy is in range of your attacks, with blows occasionally missing when it feels like they should connect, and vice versa. These issues seem particularly severe when fighting on an incline; at one point in my recent demo I found myself battling a trio of zombies on a flight of stairs, and here both sides wound up clawing at the air with no apparent effect.
Weirdly, the throwing mechanics are extremely reliable, to the point where it seems that you will always hit your target, unless someone pops up to bite you first. You can only equip two weapons at a time, so after a couple of lobs you’ll have to delve into a menu to select another two projectiles, but even so throwing seems to be the combat tactic of choice, in the early game at least.
While GameSpy notes that the characters are hardly convincing:
This baffling presentation wouldn’t be so bad if it was limited to these four alone, but it’s not. Dead Island’s mood is periodically reduced to outright comedy by its painfully thoughtless character designs, and the fact your player of choice will often spout very unusual lines during combat only serves to tip the game further into some kind of unintentional slapstick-horror pantomime. Hearing Purna exclaim, “What’s wrong with you!” at a decomposing tourist seconds after being briefed on exactly what’s going on is funny at first, then slightly tragic soon after. If Dead Island was shooting for Z-grade horror silliness ala Evil Dead this would all be a boon, but the game very explicitly wants to be taken seriously. This is a survival-horror title and its atmosphere’s supporting infrastructure is everything to its immersion, but by the time you meet a facially-tattooed Maori quest vendor who sounds like Steve Irwin, you’ll realise something: The trailer is a lie.
And many a quest will you be embarking on. All cringe-worthy characterisations aside, underneath the meaty thwack of Dead Island’s predominantly hand-to-hand combat throbs the heart of an RPG-lite. It’s nothing super-numerical, but some repurposed tropes are there to keep things a little more interesting. Damage is measured in floating hit points, weapons degrade over time, every vigorous physical action from running to jumping requires stamina, and each character has a unique three-pathed skill tree to shape upon gaining a level. It’s not dissimilar to Borderlands in this regard, although once again there is ambience-breaking inconsistency at work here. For instance, one of Purna’s first available skills is the ability to draw her side-arm and enter a kind of rage mode-esque slow-motion shooting gallery. Wait. She’s had a gun this whole time but can only use it when she’s sufficiently upset?
Capsule Computers wonders whether the title will offer multiple solutions to quests:
The developers are highlighting the importance of character development and narrative, but from my limited time with the title, I’m unsure of the extent of this. As far as I could tell, it amounts mostly to some fairly archetypal player characters, who (develop) during the game in terms of their abilities. This is fine for an RPG, but in a narrative sense, the characters don’t seem to matter.
Also unclear is how big an impact the player will have on the narrative. RPGs generally provide alternate methods of completing quests, or give the player key choices that affect how the story pans out. Nothing has been said about this, which leads me to think each quest will be based on a simple success/failure dichotomy.
It’s too early to tell how it will work, but there is definitely room for some interesting narrative devices, if they choose that direction.
And finally, GamesRadar echoes the impressions of many other previews in noting that there doesn’t seem to be any meaningful difference between characters:
We discovered that initially there’s not much difference between the characters just a tiny variance in health, speed, or stamina (what you use to attack and sprint). The characters diverge as they gain levels because they have unique skill trees to develop so for instance Purna has a whole tree dedicated to improving her use of guns. Other than unlocking the Fury move, however, we were a bit disappointed that hardly any of the unlockable skills really add any significant active gameplay you don’t unlock a bunch of new attacks or combos, but rather just upgrade passive attributes like reducing how quickly your weapons wear out. Still, many of the skills will affect the way you play if you want to take advantage of the improvements when playing Purna we purchased a skill that raises your Fury meter more quickly if you kill a zombie with a kick attack; thus, we were stomping zombie heads left and right instead of finishing them with a weapon attack.
The other main difference between the characters is their Fury attack itself. You build up the meter gradually, so you can’t use Fury often, but when you do it’s supremely overpowered. Due to the difficulty design of the game, smart use of Fury becomes important. At one point we decided to be ballsy and check out the main hotel on the island, which seems to be where the outbreak began, so we assumed there would be more zombies there. We were right. So far, Dead Island hasn’t thrown huge numbers of undead at the player, and we don’t know how big the groups will get later on, but even small groups are extremely dangerous. In this case, the biggest group encountered yet was a measly six zombies, and yet we were in trouble swiftly. Barely surviving with a sliver of health and having to run constantly between getting in jabs, we struggled for minutes with the mob. Then we filled our Fury meter, and since we controlled Purna, activating Fury meant we got to pull out a special pistol and one-shot each of the zombies, turning the near-death encounter into a slaughter in our favor. So the Fury doesn’t feel like the typical (rage) meter in many games because you won’t be casually activating it against random enemies you’ll want to save it for just the right moment.
