Well... This is my Dead Island Review...
.Story: The story of Dead Island is simple, you start the game by choosing one of the four main characters that are presented to you, each one with they own attributes and specialties. Then, after the character selection, you start the story in a luxurious Hotel in Banoi (fictional Island) situated in Papua New Guinea. At the Hotel, you get drunk (at a party), get in a fight (at a party), you faint out some times and the you wake up in your room... After this intro, the game is simple, your goal is to survive this zombie breakout and make a lot of quests until you get rescued from that Island.
.First I am going to point the good things:
- The game has a great and immersive atmosphere, in which helps a little in the story and the game overall;
- The game is gradually increasing the difficulty, allowing the player to learn new tactics, leveling up and looting new items;
- The fictional location used is a fresh feature in this type of games;
.Now it comes the bad things:
- This game actually has an story, but it is slow, sometimes uninteresting and boring;
- The voice performances are not that great, story also suffers from this;
- Some of the quests don´t make sense and some of them also feel forced just to add some gameplay time;
- The intro was cool, but the pacing was little bit fast;
.Gameplay:
This is where Dead Island shines and make the things right, the gameplay is actually pretty fun, and I enjoyed it a lot. Most of the time you will fight the zombies with objects. This could be boring, but the gameplay, the unpredictable and the feeling of each attack makes this type of fight worthy and fun. By the middle of the game you will be able to use some firearms, but be warned, there are not that ammunition in the island, since the game is heavily focused in melee combat. The skill tree is well done and the looting system could have been more fun. Don´t forget to play this game in co-op mode, it´s a different, funnier and better experience.
.Graphics/Sound: I did not had the opportunity to play this game at launch, and I am glad I didn´t. I saw a lot of complains in the steam forums about the horrible and annoying game bugs. When I played this game, the bugs were nonexistent. The graphics in Dead are good, but some character models were not that good. Chrome Engine is a powerful game engine, but I feel that Techland could have gone further, but overall the graphics were good enough to make an incredible atmosphere, and player will feel highly immerse in this fictional location. The sound design (not the voice acting) was very impressive and also helped the game atmosphere.
Overall, Dead Island is a solid survival game and you should play it with more three friends, its a lot more fun. I was going to give this game a 7 out of 10, but the gameplay and atmosphere made the final verdict raise up to 7.5 out of 10. I really wanted to give an 8 out of 10, but I just can´t, this lacks in story telling and some of the quests can be considered waste of time, so the final verdict is: 7.5 out of 10.