A satisfying experience for those who love to explore lush environments, find sweet loot, and annihilate zombies.
Regarding the environment, it delivers a rich world to explore with details everywhere. A deserted towel on a beach with a lunch pail lets your imagination ponder what happened. A trail of blood leading to cans of food next to a corpse lets you wonder if the deceased was trying to help others or merely escape alone.
Greatly aiding Dead Islands immersion are crisp ambient sounds. Gusty winds, smooth waterfalls, lush jungle wildlife, and much more bring the locations to life. Combine that with great dynamic shadows from tree canopies and tense shadows in dark hallways. Graphically, Dead Island is a very nice looking game even in 2013. The enemy animations are smooth, the textures are detailed, and the visual effects are solid. The music is also very atmospheric, playing at key scenes and at safe locations, building up a great sense of haunting despair mixed with a tinge of hopefulness.
On the gameplay side, you basically do one thing: utterly decimate zombie hordes. What makes killing zombies so compelling is the absolutely incredible dynamic zombie damage system. You will rip flesh apart, watch zombies burn and melt before your eyes, hack off limbs that spurt and gurgle, and watch armless zombies fry like bacon. Stellar sound effects for zombies, slashing, hacking, and so on greatly add to the joy of it all.
Moreover, the game has a lot of quality of life features. The penalty for death is refreshingly forgiving. You lose some money but within seconds spawn quite close to where you were as if you never died. Convenient fast travel locations make it quick to hop around finishing quests. No destination is ever more than a few minutes away, which makes all the fetch quests more palatable.
The coop system also deserves special mention, offering a few ingenious ideas. Of note is the truly brilliant coop leveling system where each player sees enemies at his or her level. This works remarkably well, allowing for players of any level to play with each other. The easy drop-in and drop-out system works well. The four playable classes offer slightly different specializations and complement each other just enough to make partying up worthwhile.
The coop system also features an incredibly useful "warp to other players" option whenever one player wishes to start a cutscene or major quest event. This allows one player to go to the quest objective while the others fool about hacking zombies and then merely instantly warp to the quest location when needed. Every coop game needs this.
On the content side, the game offers a solid 25 hours of exploration if you want to see and do it all. The game has four acts, and you can go back and forth freely until the very last segment, which the game warns you about. The devil is in the details, and Dead Island offers a great amount of detailed content. The mini-sandbox locations allow for rewarding exploration with optional areas and quests to find. Hidden chests are also tucked away for the intrepid adventurer. Plus there's an endless New Game Plus mode which is wonderful for exploring the game again and continuing to level up to the quite high cap of 60.
Dead Island has issues, of course. The movement controls and aiming can be wonky. There's weird movement acceleration going on. Zombies grab you too frequently. Knocking down doors gets old. The PC version can be tweaked to fix all the aforementioned issues. Use of the Dead Island Helper community tool is essential to fix other issues. There can be dubious hit detection at times. Thug zombies will knock you down many a time despite you not being quite in range, but soon you'll be destroying them so no worries. The infected fast zombies sometimes run right through your attacks, but most of the time things are fine. Friendly fire with explosives can be unfortunate if playing with careless (or griefing) players. NPC faces and eyes can stare oddly at times, but that's a minor quibble.
On the coop side, viewing each other's inventory or stats would have been nice. Proper partner health displays would have been nice too. When playing coop, your partners' attack, stomp, and open door animations are laughably terrible (you don't ever see these playing solo), which actually isn't a big deal and is kind of funny. It is unfortunate item and money pickups usually don't share in coop, which does create ninja-looting opportunities.
The biggest criticism seems to be that the game is mostly all about slaying zombies over and over and over. Some will find this and the many fetch quests tedious, perhaps. Then again, the game flows quite nicely if you only do the main quests and few optional quests directly on your path. I find the criticism of tedium unfounded for two reasons. First, slashing, chopping, smashing, burning, frying, blowing up, and otherwise horribly murdering zombies is just plain fun. If you don't enjoy killing zombies, why are you even playing Dead Island? Second, all the fetch quests are entirely optional and really just an excuse to kill more zombies, get sweet loot, and level up.
Ultimately, Dead Island is a satisfying experience for those who love to explore lush environments, build up a character, find sweet loot, and creatively annihilate thousands of zombies. If you look past the flaws, you may find Dead Island to be a unique trip full of great sights, splendid slaughter, and coop camaraderie. For me personally, after exploring the game twice over, I feel like I've truly vacationed on Hanoi. I've partied hard with Sveti, helped out my good friend Sinamoi, and I've brought some sanity to a lot of survivors scattered on the island. Oh, and I've ruthlessly terrorized legions of zombies.
PS: the GOTY edition includes two DLCs. First is an Arena location, which is a convenient place to slaughter zombies, unlock challenges, and level up. It's a nice edition if a bit unremarkable. Second is the 2 to 3 hours Ryder White mini-campaign that gives you more back-story and reveals quite important story details. It is sort of the modern military shooter of Dead Island since leveling up is disabled and the path forward is always quite linear. If you have any interest in the actual story of Dead Island, the White campaign is very much worth playing, although I was glad it only lasted a few hours.