The PC version is somewhere between a masterful adventure and a sloppy mess.
When embarking on your quest through Banoi island, you'll choose one of four characters, each with their own backstories and combat specialties. The latter is the only thing that will matter during your playthrough. While the former is interesting when it is first explained, it will never come up again, so don't expect differing plot lines. The beginning of the game that follows gives off a great first impression with your character passing out drunk and waking up in a deserted resort hotel. Making your way to the first set of healthy human characters is tense, and it sets a fantastic tone.
But then the characters themselves… On the whole, they are blatant stereotypes and often portrayed by voice actors making poor attempts at the accents of several nationalities. There are decent actors here and there, but they are unfortunately overshadowed by the numerous lousy ones. And hardly any of them are likable. If they're not horribly selfish, they are irritatingly condescending. As a result, when Dead Island does attempt to paint an emotional picture or teach a moral lesson from time to time, the moments come off as hokey and random. This game wants to tell a moving story, but it doesn't happen. It's just the beginning of how the game spreads itself thin, wanting to fill too many needs at once without fully committing to some of them.
Your first taste of melee combat ensues soon after meeting your human friends. It's up close, brutal, bloody, and gory. The sound here is fantastic; you can feel the impact of every blow as your weapon painfully thumps against your enemy's body, or splats as his skull explodes and rains blood on the ground. The zombies themselves offer idle groans standing in the street, powerful growls as they take a swing at you, and absolutely bone-chilling screams in the distance just before sprinting towards you. These moments are where the game is at its best and most immersive.
When you get the first looks at the landscape overlooking the glorious beaches and distant mountains, Dead Island is quite attractive. You'll catch quite a few breathtaking views playing through Act I, but as the game continues, the visuals seem less and less impressive. Locales become repetitive and bland with increasingly monotonous textures and color schemes. The pacing of the game takes a serious hit as a result, slowing consistently until simply plodding. You'll be completely over the sewers well before you're tasked with entering them for the umpteenth time.
The melee combat control itself is fun if not a little wonky. But with some early adjustment, it's generally satisfying to hone your timing and strike a balance between kicking your opponents away and swinging for the fences. But there are also moments when Dead Island gives you a gun and wants to be an FPS, and these are not as pleasing. Human enemy AI is not much of an improvement over the understandably dumb zombies. Crouching often doesn't get you low enough behind cover to be effective, and for some reason, your character insists on standing every time you pick up an item, placing you back in the line of fire. Melee combat is certainly where it's at in this game, and it's luckily much more common.
The melee strategy also gets a little deeper with the "analog" combat control scheme, which allows you greater control over swinging your weapon. However, this option is not available if you're playing with a mouse and keyboard. That's right, even though many gamers opt for PC versions of games specifically for the mouse and keyboard control, Dead Island makes it painfully clear that they don't want you to use it. You won't get access to the analog combat control option. Exiting in-game menus with the mouse often results in executing an attack (you'd better hope you didn't have that molotov cocktail armed). And a launch bug in the game actually causes strafing to stutter and lag, but only when using the keyboard. Every single one of these issues vanishes when employing a gamepad.
But there are many other problems with the PC version that aren't so easily solved. Standard graphical adjustments like field of view, anti-aliasing, vertical sync, shadow quality, filtering, bloom effects… Not a single one of these can be adjusted in-game. Popular surround sound headphones like the Logitech G35 are plagued with clicks, pops, and occasional deafening white noise making them almost unusable. Fortunately, forum communities have banded together to identify solutions to many of these problems by finding and editing various configuration files with text editors (and thank god for that, because you'll certainly want to enable VSync unless you're a fan of horrendous screen tearing). But really, if this version of the game was provided to just ten other PC gamers prior to launch, almost all of these issues would have been identified in moments. The fact that nearly all of these problems can be circumvented by file edits smacks of absolute laziness when preparing this version of the game. Would it have been back-breaking to add one more setup menu with toggles for these features?
If you put in the time and effort to get around the issues (which hopefully will all be patched eventually), then you have yourself a very playable game. Aside from the already-lengthy campaign, you'll find more side missions than you can shake a machete at to fill the 20+ hours of play time. You'll collect plenty of miscellaneous materials that can be used to customize your melee weapons with barbed wire or additional weights. You'll steadily gain experience and level up your character, unlocking attributes that pay immediate dividends. If you ignore the moments when Dead Island attempts to play the emotional card, you'll find a whole lot of game and a whole lot of fun.
It's even more fun with friends. The co-op play in Dead Island is undoubtedly its greatest strength. Some of the missions towards the end of the game that are frustratingly difficult when playing alone end up as hugely entertaining bloodfests with a few friends. And hopping in and out of groups is absolutely painless. When playing by yourself, the game will tell you when another player is at the same location as you are and you can join them with the press of a button. After you've completed the mission with your group, you can always drop back out and continue on by yourself if you don't want to keep playing online. The ease of the drop-in, drop-out multiplayer and the pure enjoyment of the co-op experience offers fantastic replay value even after you've finished the campaign.
Dead Island tries to be a lot of things, but it doesn't succeed at all of them. The attempts at emotional attachment fall flat, and the gunplay action leaves much to be desired. Conversely, the melee combat is brutal fun, the RPG elements offer satisfying progress, and the length and scale of the game are quite impressive. And even though the campaign slows to a crawl late, invite some friends and the fun is instantly revitalized time and time again. There are quite a few bugs that must be ignored to maintain the enjoyment, though, and the PC version requires some particularly thick skin while working your way to an optimal configuration. But if you have the patience to deal with the drawbacks, Dead Island offers some of the most satisfying co-op gameplay of the year. Even if you don't purchase it immediately, it deserves an eventual spot in your collection. And like the zombies themselves, the online community will be extremely hard to kill off, so expect it to be alive for some time.