Dead Island is an open world game in the light of Fallout 3. It has some polish issues throughout, but they don’t take away from the great combat, exploration, collection, and discovery. Waking up in your hotel room after a drunken bender, you find yourself in a hotel room. Learning the basic controls while searching around the room, you find the door that leads to a darkened passageway. Eventually, you find that you are immune to whatever is causing most of the other island goers to turn into flesh eating zombies. Before the game starts, you are given the option of choosing one of four characters. Each skin plays slightly different. There is a firearms expert; thrown weapons expert, blunt weapons expert, and sharp weapons expert. Depending on which character you choose, a different skill tree will be open to you, allowing the player to customize their survivor. Two of the three trees are survival and combat, allowing for perks based on whether you want to beef up your stamina, ability to pick locks, health pack effectiveness, etc. The third tree is rage, which gives the player a tremendously powerful attack that only lasts for a brief time, but is usually powerful enough to clear the screen of any undead. Much like the other open world games that have come before it, Dead Island starts the player out with no weapons at all, forcing you to scavenge the environment, unlike Left4Dead, which has “weapons stashes.” Because of this, it’s a melee-heavy game. There are guns, but I’ve only found three in my first 6 hours of gameplay. You can repair and upgrade your weapons while also there is a crafting system once you find, or are rewarded, blueprints to make your own. The zombies are great! You have big strong ones that don’t move too much, “walkers” who plod slowly towards you, and “infected” that are terribly fast. I’ve only come across these three types so far, but I’m guessing that there are other types. They are attracted to noise, so it helps to look around a lot and make sure that you don’t concentrate too much on one thing. While in combat, it’s important not to zone in on one zombie without scanning the area you’re in to make sure other zombies aren’t inbound. In the outlying areas, the zombies are fairly well spread out, but once you get into some of the population centers (hotel, town, etc.), there are tons of them floating around. Because the player is on a resort island, there are a lot of places where goods are stashed. You can search bags, shelves, buildings, etc. for supplies. You have an initial limit of 12 weapons to carry, but for some?reason, you aren’t limited to “stuff,” such as water bottles, wire, rope, batteries, etc. I would like to have seen a weight limit like?in Fallout or other loot-fests. Whether you’re playing as one of the smaller women or the tank character, you can carry the exact same?amount of stuff. The graphics in Dead Island are pretty good, but not spectacular. Because the game lacks polish, it suffers from some jagged graphics and some slow-to-load skins on NPC’s and environmental decorations. With the game being set on a tropical island, the graphics are certainly better than dark world presented in both Left4Dead games, the drab, bleak setting in FO and the two Fallout games, but not groundbreaking either. Multiplayer is a mixed bag. You can play with 4 total people, including yourself. Anyone can jump into your game if you have your slots set to public. While it’s great to earn experience with other people, if they are off doing their own thing and complete a mission, you don’t have the opportunity to go back and beat the mission on your own, so you miss out on that story arc. I restarted a new character on my 3rd sit-down with the game because, prior to that, I was questing with 3 other people and had to go and feed my son. When I came back, they had beaten close to a dozen missions. I only found this out when I walked around and looked on the map and saw a number of exclamation points (depicting open missions). It sucked, but I was only about 2.5 hours into that character. I may do a second play through later on with a public character to beef him up without fear of missing the story. I won’t say that I’m going to put 100+ hours into it like I did with Fallout 3, but it looks like there’s a ton of stuff to see and do, so I would completely recommend the game. Share with friends!
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