Every once in while, we here at SideQuesting get caught of by a game that’s so big, so unyieldingly dense that we cannot hope to find the time to condense everything that we want to say about it into a single article.
Dead Island from Deep Silver is one such game.
And so, rather than just pump out a review, our Gameplay Diaries will give our immediate reactions to the game on a chapter-by-chapter basis. At the end of these single-player diaries we will cap things off with a comprehensive multiplayer review for Dead Island.
Like a lot of people, I was caught off guard by the first Dead Island promo trailer earlier this year. It was sad, unconventional, and it really made me excited for the game.
Then, like a lot of other people that loved the trailer, I began to find out what the game was actually about and became significantly less enthusiastic.
It appeared to be a combination of the first person, four-player antics of the Left 4 Dead series with the insane weaponry and customization of Dead Rising, tied together by the class-based skill trees of Borderland. Now, I’m a big fan of all of those games but it wasn’t what that trailer had groomed me to expect.
Regardless, when I got my review code for Dead Island I dived right in to see what all this hullabaloo was about. Just as I feared, the game was absolutely nothing like what I had hoped for. In actuality it was much, much better.
The game starts with me choosing one of four characters, each of which comes with their own backstory and specializes in a different form of combat. What surprised me about these characters was just how much their backgrounds deviate from video game cliches. Most games put us in the role of one of a few archetypes: a meat-head soldier, a moon-eyed child, an ‘everyman’, etc — I swear, so many games star an ‘everyman’ these days that I’m amazed we have any left. At this point the entire corporate world should just be populated with supermodels and quantum physicists, while the remaining regular Joes are off saving the world.
Each of the four main characters in Dead Island is in a bad place in their life: a washed up rap star, an injured football player, a repressed cop and a disillusioned bodyguard. In short, everyone in the game hates their life. Something else I found to be very refreshing is that while each of the male leads seems to be a clueless has-been, the female leads are highly-trained cops and/or ex-cops. It’s something that you don’t necessarily see in a lot of games.
Dispatched gender roles not withstanding, I selected the down-on-his-luck musician, as the game informed me that he was very good at hitting things.
The game opens with a hazy, drug-fueled first-person sequence introducing me to each of the playable characters and the early stages of a zombie infection. All of this happens while the quaint, yet entirely too catchy “Who do you Voodoo, Bitch?” provides a (perhaps inappropriate) musical backdrop. I then found myself awakening in a hotel room as one of the four characters that I just met. Minor atmospheric hiccups like that actually seem to happen quite frequently as characters refer to me in the collective, even while I play alone. Not only that, but no matter how many people are actually playing, all four characters appear during certain cut-scenes. I’m not sure if I should categorize these glitches as irritating or hilarious. They are possibly just a fundamental component of a proper Techland experience. Regardless, telling myself not to notice them is like trying not to notice that after coming home from work one day, my previously orange tabby cat is now gray. And a girl.
After escaping the hallways of the abandoned hotel in favor of something a bit more open-ended, I’ve discovered two things: I really, really love collecting random scrap like a mad MacGuyver, and the world of Dead Island is really damned pretty. I’ve been playing on a fairly impressive PC with the graphics cranked up to maximum, so your mileage my vary on this one if you’ve opted for one of the console versions. On the PC, at least, the vistas and beach-scapes that Techland has sculpted are absolutely gorgeous.
I was then promptly attacked by a herd of bikini clad zombies.
I dispatched the enemies easily enough with the tried and true method of hitting them with rather large bits of wood. This strategy seemed adequate at first, but I soon realized that mousing over targets would allow me to auto lock-on to specific appendages. I have heard that there is also an option in the controls menu that allows for one-to-one control between my mouse and my weapon, sort of like the melee combat in Daggerfall or Too Human, but I say that I’ve heard about this feature because I was unable to do it successfully. As far as I can tell, the option is only unlocked when using an analog stick controller, rather than a mouse and keyboard. I found this to be pretty aggravating as the game’s lock-on system is sketchy at best. It’s very annoying when you think that you’re about to give a zombie a good wallop to the leg only to have the reticule slip off and miss. I’d much rather have complete control in my hands.
Breaking limbs doesn’t just provide a sense of satisfaction or extra experience points. Doing so will cripple the offending infected. This allots me more time to focus on the dozens of her friends that have suddenly just appeared… right behind me! Hurry up! Quick! Hit ’em with a broom before they bite – OH GOD!
As you can imagine, I found myself unprepared for this first assault. I didn’t exactly die, but I did realize that I would need to get more acquainted with Dead Island‘s crafting system before I continued.
Normally, I anticipate crafting to be an exciting and fruitful venture in games, only to be horribly disappointed by the rareness of ingredients, inventory burdening, in-game repair costs and the other myriad tortures that developers decide to use to roadblock my creative flow. There are exceptions to the rule. The Witcher 2 provided just the right blend of challenge as well as fair and balanced usefulness to keep me making more potions than I can shake a mortar and pestle at. In the case of Dead Island, burdens like weapon degradation and the accompanying repair costs are still present and accounted for, yet mitigated by readily available components and unlimited inventory space for crafting ingredients. It’s surprising how quickly my concerns melted away when given the concession of a hammerspace for my crafting materials.
So far, both combat and crafting receive my seal of approval, but with room for improvement. I don’t want to have to purchase a $60 controller to experience the combat to the fullest, though, especially if it means just clicking the left mouse button again and again for the rest of the game. Furthermore, I can see that without the benefit of a Borderlands-esque “vacuum” mechanic, looting items and enemies could get very wearisome, very quickly. I’ll have to see how my patience holds up over the course of the entire game.
Anyway, having mastered these basic mechanics I ventured deeper into this island of the dead (see what I did there?) collecting quests and colored loot along the way. Quests work pretty much the same way in Dead Island as they do in every MMO ever made, or perhaps more accurately, identical to the way they work in Borderlands. Quests are collected and accumulated in a journal and completed at my leisure with cash and XP bonuses dangled as rewards — again, just like Borderlands. In fact, I’m beginning to feel that the entire game exudes a distinctly Borderlands musk.
It should be no surprise then that the first part of the game ends with a final showdown pitting the player against a slightly stronger, “named” version of the average enemy units. In this case, I dispatched the brute quite easily with a few well-placed smacks from a stick covered in rusty nails that I’d assembled back at the crafting station. I didn’t complete all of the side quests offered to me, but thankfully they do appear to have carried over into the next chapter, awaiting my return. Which is nice.
With my first series of main objectives completed I’ve decided that I really like Dead Island so far, perhaps a lot more than I may have let on in my initial impressions. I’m more concerned about how my opinion will change as I progress through the story. I can already see the vanguard of my own impatience welling up just behind the corner. I’m really hoping that Dead Island can keep my attention throughout rather than fall apart like a shambling corpse.
End of Chapter One.
Disclosure: This gameplay diary is based on a copy of the game for the PC provided by the publisher.
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