Dead Island

This game rocks!

I awaken to the sound of screams.

For a moment I am disoriented and groggy. Sunlight streams in through the blinds and the room blurs in my vision as I sit up, cradling my head in my hands. There is no noise now. What I heard earlier, did I imagine it? Perhaps it was nothing more than the tattered remnants of drunken dreams.

I get up and stumble to the bathroom, finding a first aid kit on the counter, which I take. I can remember the night before now, like a bad acid trip. There are flashes of blood and violence, mixed in with images of people dancing and stage lights. A rap song with a catchy chorus sticks in my head.

As I enter the hallway, an automated voice over the hotel speakers makes a looping announcement, telling visitors and service personnel alike to evacuate the premises.

Has something happened?

Red lights overhead. I start to head to the right, towards an open door, but I hesitate. Was this the direction I had heard the screaming coming from? I don’t think I want to see what’s in there. Besides, that isn’t the way out.

I turn left instead.

The hallway is littered with luggage carts, for some strange reason. As I am a compulsive thief, I rifle through the bags for anything of value.

Man, the porters were lazy today.

I find deodorant.

Excellent.

There’s also a bunch of cash, coming in at about sixty dollars total. The day is off to a good start and there are no hotel porters or security to stop me.

My crime spree continues unabated.

I go through drawers and cabinets, and more bags than I’d care to count, collecting cash and lots of little odds and ends and breaking down a connecting door between two rooms. The place is dark and I pan around inside for more stuff with my flashlight, before I reenter the hallway and finally make my way out onto one of the hotel balconies.

Welcome to Banoi, the most picturesque, beautiful island resort you'll ever visit. Why, it's to DIE for.

Oooh, more piles of luggage.

Ah, but I hear something. A scream or a shout from above. As I near the edge of the balcony, something, or rather someone, falls right past me, howling wordlessly. I back away filled once more with unease. There’s blood at the entrance to one of the adjacent hallways. I wonder again what’s going on. Where are all the people? Who pushed that guy off the balcony above me?

I look out over the beautiful island vista, spread out before me. What a gorgeous place. Perfect for a vacation and a little larceny.

Unsettled, my rampant thievery continues, albeit at a slightly slower, more nervous pace.

There is more luggage inside and I quickly pillage everything within easy reach, before I creep slowly towards an elevator, hoping to find a way out of this place. The beam of my flashlight flits nervously from one place to another.

I still can’t find anyone else.

Am I the only one left? Maybe all of this loot I’m grabbing is going to be less useful than I thought. Maybe I shouldn’t bother. Maybe instead I should—

Hang on a sec. Looks like I missed a pile of bags.

Found a laptop battery and lots more cash. I’m in the money today!

Where was I? Oh, right. Escaping. Yeah, I should really do that. I’ve gone through all the luggage in this area anyway.

The stairs are blocked for some reason. In fact they look kind of like someone barricaded them from the other side. That’s not ominous at all or anything.

The elevator doors are open, but the elevator itself isn’t on the same level as I am. It’s on the one below. I have to pull open the hatch and drop down into it from above. I’m sure this will end in a perfectly safe manner.

The instant my feet touch the floor of the elevator, it plummets like a stone tossed into a lake.

Stairs. I think as I grip the railing inside the elevator and I plunge to what will inevitably be a violent and messy end.

I should have taken the damn stairs.

Oh but wait! The emergency brakes catch and I look out through the open doors at a group of people doing...uh...man that looks unpleasant. What are they doing anyway? I can’t quite see, but they certainly notice me. Oh yes and now they are running straight at me in a highly alarming fashion making noises one would not normally associate with the human mouth.

Just before they reach the elevator doors, it sinks with a sickening lurch and the breaks lock once more. I am now one floor below whatever was just going on up there. Hopefully that’s a good thing.

A voice comes on over an intercom, urging me to find a weapon and arm myself. That sounds like a great idea, mysterious person. Let me just—ooh, more luggage!

There’s a great deal of blood in this area. Getting slightly more nervous now. The only way forward leads to an indoor fountain. The waters run red from a pair of corpses lying within.

Gah, how disgusting. Just gonna stay as far as I can from those smelly things. Wait...must...resist....

This guy’s wallet had fifty bucks in it and the other dead guy had some more deodorant.

Score!

Hmm, hmm, loot loot loot. Wait, who's that over there?

I start to walk down the hallway to my right, when vague, threatening forms in the distance begin running towards me, screaming and snarling.

Hot damn! It’s the fuzz! I knew hotel security would catch up with me sooner or later. I turn and sprint blindly in the other direction, hoping that the people who have been murdered behind me might distract the cops, but no such luck.

Man, these guys are really dedicated to their jobs.

The voice on the intercom system is babbling something about them being infected, but I’m not really paying too much attention.

I’m not going back to the big house!

I hit the door running and slam it closed behind me, but before I can take off again, (I mean, they must have keys) someone jumps me and chomps on my arm and I get walloped from behind and lose consciousness.

So ends the unskippable prologue to Dead Island.

I played up some elements for humorous effect, but it’s really quite creepy and that’s one of the reasons I really love this game.

ATMOSPHERE.

It’s so easy to get wrong and so difficult to get right. That visceral combination of sight, sound, and feeling that can make or break a game. Dead Island has it in spades. They advertised it as paradise meets hell and they pretty much nailed it.

In almost every scene unsettling background music plays. It’s not overwhelming or intrusive, but it helps set the tone in a way that adds emotional impact to what you’re looking at.

The sun is shining on the tropical island paradise of Banoi. The clear water glistens in the sunlight and beach towels and umbrellas sit abandoned and forlorn on the beach. In the distance storm clouds loom and you can hear the sound of approaching wind and rain.

All the fun in the sun you could ever want! You just have to watch out for all the horrifying undead folks trying to bite your face off.

A storm is brewing, interfering with communication with the outside world.

You are isolated and alone.

Where do you go when you first hit the beach?

It’s such a wonderful place. The sun and the sand and the surf. You could go back to the giant luxury resort hotel, looming over the landscape, but I wouldn’t recommend that unless you really have to. The front area is festooned with pools and an outside water park, surrounded by bungalows available for rent.

There are tiki bars and slides and underground restrooms. The hotel itself is actually divided into two gigantic buildings, with an outside café and lots of tables set up in between them. The entrance area has a large fountain which shoots multiple geysers of water up into the air.

On the beach is an information booth/souvenir shop and further down, there’s a setup for an outdoor concert. There are plenty of changing rooms and a few lifeguard shacks. You could even kick around some beach balls if you wish.

I spent a ton of time looking around this place, lost in the beauty of the ocean and the tropical scenery. Across the water you can see a coastal town of some sort. I really did feel like a tourist, taking screenshots almost everywhere I went.

The first area of the game is huge and you can travel all over the map with pretty much no restrictions, unless you attempt to swim for the far shore or something. The game does give you an annoying [OUT OF BOUNDS] warning when you attempt to do that, but there are very few invisible walls.

So that’s the paradise.

Time for the hell.

With a bloody streak of gore and a strangled moan, Dead Island reaches out with rotting arms and plants you face first into the middle of a classic zombie outbreak.

There are corpses almost everywhere you go, victims of the undead uprising, many of them waiting for an unwary person such as yourself to come wandering by so they can leap at you and take a bite.

There’s blood staining the waters of the fountain at the hotel entrance, trails of gore lead down into one of the restrooms and the entire population of tourists seem to have taken up residence in the pools by the bungalows, making it one of the areas most populated with the undead menace, early game. A haunting, off key musical refrain plays if you venture near the hotel area, making an already tense player increasingly more on edge the longer you stay there, waiting to grapple with the undead scourge.

You see this place? This is a big ol epic trip to nopesville. Don't go here unless you have to, early game. It is chock full of the undeads.

In fact it’s this dichotomy that makes the game interesting. Contrasting the horror going on around you with the pristine beauty of your surroundings is visually stunning and memorable.

Even the characters notice how pretty the island is. There’s one place at the top of a staircase overlooking the beach where each of them has a line of dialogue to that effect.

So who are these people?

Well, the four main characters of Dead Island are Sam B, Purna, Logan, and Xian Mei. I think I would not be inaccurate stating that these four are rather discontented, angry individuals.

Sam B is a rapper with a one hit wonder song under his belt...and virtually no recognition for his other work. You can see him rapping his hit single, “Who do you Voodoo” in the intro movie and I do have to say that it’s quite a catchy tune and fits the theme of the game perfectly. He’s at Banoi for a concert and hopefully another shot at making it big.

Sam is the toughest character of the bunch and a blunt weapons specialist. Though his damage isn’t the highest of the four characters, his hp definitely is, allowing him to wade into the midst of the zombie crowds with a sledgehammer and send his enemies flying. He’s even got a skill that draws enemy attention towards him, allowing him to tank the hits while the other characters keep their distance or flank enemies. All of the characters have a special rage mode attack, which drastically increases their damage. Sam pulls out a pair of brass knuckles and starts punching zombies in the face for as long as his fury lasts. It’s worth noting that there are more blunt weapons in the game than any other type, so this character is a sure bet for finding equipment anywhere. Oh and if you hit an enemy hard enough with a blunt weapon you can break their arms and prevent them from punching or grabbing you.

Purna is an ex cop with a chip on her shoulder. She felt like she was never given a fair shake by the force, calling it a ‘good ol boys’ club. She left after an incident where she shot a pedophile who had money and connections, though not fatally, which is something she regrets. Now she works as a bodyguard for, and I quote, “rich, white assholes.”

Nice.

Unfortunately, she is kind of a difficult character to play as early game. She doesn’t get good damage bonuses for either bladed or blunt melee weapons and with the game’s default loot settings, you won’t find more than one or two really terrible guns in Act 1 and there’s virtually no source of ammunition. Purna is a gun specialist and she really shines mid to late game after guns become more commonplace and you can put skill points into things that actually help you, rather than pointlessly dumping them into useless melee damage bonuses you won’t ever use after Act 1. Early game, she functions somewhat like a lousy version of the other characters. She can’t hit as hard or do as much damage and you can’t find guns anywhere. Late game though...shoot ALL of the things.

As the only long range character, (Logan’s more mid range) Purna is capable of taking out even the toughest enemies at a distance. She also functions as a support character, having an aura that gives various stat bonuses to all characters, including herself, who are within a certain distance of her. She also has a good chance to one shot anything with a close range blast of a shotgun if you aim for their heads. Her rage mode has her pull out a revolver with unlimited ammo and shoot things till the timer runs out.

I actually managed to solo the entire game with her. She’s fun.

I never actually played as Logan, so I can only relate what I’ve heard about him. He’s an alcoholic football player who once hit a girl in a drag race, where he was driving while drunk. He claims the other driver forced him off the road and he did jail time for the crime. I was so turned off by his backstory and personality that I’ve never played as him.

Logan’s specialty is throwing things. He’s also the only character that gets any bonus from drinking alcohol, transforming them into mini med kits. Apparently he can be quite fun to play, getting completely drunk and chucking anything and everything you can pick up and pitch at the enemies. Eventually he gets a skill where the items he throws will miraculously return to his hand. I don’t know what his rage mode does.

Last but not least, is Xian Mei. She’s a spy, from what I can gather, though a reluctant one. Apparently quite well trained in combat, she wasn’t put to the use she thought she was going to be. She still does her duty to her country, even if that ‘duty’ is to get employed by a luxury hotel and spy on the patrons.

Honestly, she comes across as the most sympathetic and caring character of the bunch. Everyone else is just pissed off.

Xian is the blade specialist of the group. She even gets a completely different move set if you are fortunate enough to ever find a katana for her. I actually played over sixty hours with her before ever even seeing a katana. Loot drops are way out of whack, unfortunately. She gets huge damage bonuses for blade weapons, but she also has the least amount of health out of the group, making her a ‘glass cannon’ capable of doing loads of damage but getting taken out in a few hits by even weak enemies. Getting surrounded is almost a sure sentence for death, even if you use her rage mode, which consists of her pulling out a switchblade and going stab happy on anything within reach. I can’t tell you how many times I would activate it, leap into the middle of the horde stabbing and slashing like a madman, only to get killed almost immediately.

Xian is very fast and hits very hard, but you also have to be very careful, playing as her. It helps if you’ve got Sam B tanking for you, as you can get damage bonuses for sneaking up on things and backstabbing them from behind. I really did feel like a true zombie slayer, as you can chop off zombie limbs and heads with bladed weapons.

So we got two black people, one male and one female, an Asian chick, and one drunk white guy. Hey, it’s different from the usual four person group demographic in video games. Progressive, maybe?

Eh, they’re all kind of a bunch of jerks, to be honest.

What makes them so special is that they’re immune to the zombie virus. Unfortunately, what this means gameplay wise is that you are the only people that get sent anywhere to fetch...pretty much everything for everyone.

If you do not like fetch quests, you may want to avoid this game, because you get sent out to find everything from boxes of juice and food for the survivors, to a full sized jumbo jet. Go here, do this, grab that and come back so we can tell you to get more stuff. Fetch quest, fetch quest, fetch quest. Hero delivery service, reporting for duty!

There are sidequests galore with all kinds of different rewards. Mostly cash, but sometimes weapons or weapon mods.

What are weapon mods, you ask? One of the more entertaining aspects of the game is the ability to modify your weapons. Electrify things that really shouldn’t have high voltage currents running through them. Don’t like that sword? Set it on fire! Add potent venom to your weapons or drastically increase the force to send even the largest of them flying away from you with a single mighty swing.

In order to accomplish this you need a workbench, cash, a massive assortment of random junk collected from all over the place, and the mod blueprints themselves, which are also hidden or given out as quest rewards.

You will spend a large amount of time looting containers, mostly luggage, but also chests and dead bodies. There is in fact, so much luggage in the first act of the game that I think there may actually be four or five times the number of bags per zombie/survivor. You could legitimately call this a bag looting simulator and you wouldn’t be off by much.

Some of the chests are locked and you need to have at least one person in your group waste points on the lockpicking skill, which would otherwise be put towards survival. The higher the lock level on the chest, the better the loot generally is and the game uses a color based loot system, sort of like a whole bunch of other rpgs. Orange is legendary, purple is rare, blue is unique, green is not all that good, and white is rubbish.

Unfortunately, as I mentioned earlier, the random number generator which governs the quality and drop rate of the loot hates you and it never wants you to have nice things. This can and should be fixed by finding an applicable mod that tweaks it to your liking. I’m a huge fan of fixing what’s broken in my video games, even if it’s not the ‘original’ game experience.

I mean, I did almost an entire playthrough as Xian without seeing a single legendary or a katana, which just sucked. I had no idea what I was missing out on.

Drop rates aside, the combat is quite entertaining. If you’re looking for a good first person melee zombie hack n slash/bash n stomp, look no further than Dead Island. This game has a little something for everyone. Like classic zombie shamblers? They’re everywhere. Want special type zombies that have their own unique attacks? There are a bunch of those too. Do you prefer running, screaming infected types? The game will randomly throw them at you as an unpleasant and wholly unwelcome surprise.

You’ll hack, slash, bludgeon, stab, stomp, shoot, burn, electrify, and blast your way through the undead hordes. Eventually you’ll even fight other humans who are hostile and want to shoot you.

Oh and you can hop into trucks and run things over too. Zombie roadkill!

If you should happen to take lethal damage, you’ll collapse and there’s a short period during which another player can revive you if they’re close enough, or they’ll just waste medkits attempting to revive you and you’ll still die due to latency issues.

Annoying.

If you do get killed you’ll simply respawn somewhere nearby, minus a percentage of your total cash. Hopefully there won’t be say, one of those annoying explodey specials standing right next to you, waiting to say hi as soon as you turn around.

There’s also an rpg leveling system with three separate skill trees that are pretty self explanatory. Kill things, get exp, get better at killing things etc. etc.

Anyway, annihilating the undead scourge is one of my absolute favorite pastimes in video games and Dead Island delivers a visceral experience that you don’t get all that often anymore. It’s a far cry from Left 4 Dead, for instance, which has nothing but specials and running infected. Dead Island is much more slowly paced.

It is a true survival horror experience.

So now let’s talk about the multiplayer.

Unfortunately, this is one of the weakest aspects of the game. Dead Island is fairly stable with two players, but if you add a third it becomes something of a crapshoot. Whereas getting and maintaining a four player session is an exercise in connectivity futility. Someone is almost always dropping out or getting kicked and the lag is murder. The longest four player session I ever saw lasted two hours and then we could never get all four of us into the same game again.

Annoyingly, the game’s default multiplayer allows random people to join your game so long as they are ‘close’ to where you are in the story mode. I would not recommend this. Playing with random people online is usually terrible and you run the risk of some thirteen year old boy who won’t shut up about "My Little Pony" joining your session.

Yeah that actually happened to me.

If you set the game to ‘private,’ only people on your steam friends list can join, but even here it’s somewhat difficult and unintuitive to join a friend’s game. It’s just kind of wonky. Not sure how else to describe it. The easiest way to do it is to just invite someone or have them invite you.

The game is quite playable as a single player game. You do not need other players and there are no enemies that incapacitate you like in the Left 4 Dead series. However there are some areas where playing by yourself is quite hard, such as the second act, which takes place in a city that’s overrun with the dead. You just need to be careful and watch out for infected charging at you from out of nowhere.

One last thing about the multiplayer. If you’re palling around with your friends and yakking it up, running over each other with the vehicles or driving off cliffs and playing catch with the molotovs and grenades, you’re probably staring at me like I’m out of my mind when I say that this is a scary game.

Honestly officer I have NO idea how that truck even got here. I was just...swimming in the fountain. Yeah, that's it.

Dead Island is really only scary if you immerse yourself in the atmosphere, playing alone in a dark room with headphones on and the volume up, soaking it all in.

The presence of other players pretty much destroys that. You just casually wipe out anything that comes at your group while making jokes about the janky looking jump animations or standing right in the other player’s face while they’re trying to talk to NPC’s. The challenge goes straight into the toilet as well. Multiple players make this game easy.

It really seems as if the game has a much more solid singleplayer than multiplayer. It’s a tense, gripping experience that eventually gets bogged down in repetitive fetch quests and length padding in the third and fourth acts, before finally almost collapsing under the weight of its overly complicated plot twists and lack of any sort of resolution.

It starts out simple, but then they try to have you figure out where all these zombies come from, involving an investigation of a clandestine laboratory in the middle of the jungle and even a tribal village that worships the undead and has you fight them in an arena to prove your honor to their chief. There’s jungle warlords with their own private armies that you shoot it out with, a supposed cure to the virus that you help make, and a prison island full of criminals that you go to, to try and meet up with someone who leads you around by the nose through the whole game.

To make matters worse, the game’s ending is total sequel bait and you have no idea what actually happened unless you play the Ryder White DLC. Now, there IS a sequel, but that sequel resolves absolutely none of the outstanding plot points from the original.

I don’t think they put as much effort into the story as they did in the combat and atmosphere.

The bad news doesn’t end there though. Technical issues have plagued Dead Island since its initial release that the developers have simply ignored. They never fixed the multiplayer. There are odd glitches you’ll sometimes run into, some of which are hilarious, like when you can take lethal damage just from kicking a beach ball. Field of view settings are locked and there’s no in-game way of changing them, but if you look around online you can figure out how to alter the config files.

And then there was the uh...trailer controversy.

The original Dead Island trailer is kind of infamous. It’s almost a work of art in and of itself. Basically a short movie about a family trying to protect their daughter against zombies attacking them in their hotel room, it’s shot in an unusual style where it starts at the end and half of it runs in reverse, switching between the reversed shots and the real time ones and finally ending in the middle. It’s set to moody, emotional music and immediately garnered a lot of attention.

Now I knew two things after I first watched this trailer. I knew objectively that the game probably wasn’t going to be anything like this short little self contained movie. There’s no in-game footage. It was produced by someone other than the game devs themselves and really, it’s just a trailer.

I also knew that I absolutely had to own this game.

You get a much better feel for the game by watching the intro movie and seeing Sam B rapping “Who do you Voodoo” at the resort party.

There were still an awful lot of terribly disappointed people complaining about how the game was nothing like the trailer.

Go figure.

Now, I really enjoy this game, but there are a couple of things I did that increased my enjoyment of it and its replayability value considerably. The first was the installation of a day/night cycle mod. The author only made the mods for act one and two sadly, but it’s still great to look at what they could have done with the game if they’d only thought about it.

And this is what the beach looks like at nighttime. Have fun, folks.

Tromping around the resort area in the moonlight is very cool and very creepy and it does prompt you to want to run or hide when it gets dark. Surviving in the city becomes doubly hard when it’s black as pitch and your flashlight is running out of battery and the zombies are closing in on you from every direction.

There’s also stormy, rainy weather, which adds a nice touch.

The other mod that I’d recommend is a simple one that modifies the inventory of the shop at the lighthouse in the resort area, adding early game guns and ammunition for Purna users. It’s no fun not being able to utilize your specialty until the game is almost half over. And of course there are mods that tweak the loot drop ratios, allowing us to actually acquire really nice items instead of never getting them ever.

So if you’re in the mood to destroy your way through an army of zombies in a beautiful tropical island resort and you don’t mind fetch quests, Dead Island is the game for you. Heck, you can even play it with your friends.

It gets two thumbs up from me.