A vacation on the dead island of Banoi is a relentlessly violent, fantastically enjoyable open-world RPG experience.
The main premise of Dead Island is to complete missions, there is the traditional main plot-line to follow, as well as many side missions all handed out to you by your fellow survivors as you try and make contact with someone who claims to be the ticket off the island for everyone. Unfortunately they happen to be in a rather out of the way location so you have a lot of ground to cover in terms of Dead Island's HUGE maps. The game is literally massive, it took me 40 hours to go through doing a large number of the side quests and the locations are wonderfully varied. You battle zombies on beautiful beaches, in abandoned buildings, in city streets, and dense jungles. The zombies themselves are a fairly varied lot too from the bog standard stumbling walkers to the psychotic stump-armed butchers that lunge at you relentlessly. Different types of zombies require different battle tactics too requiring some different styles of game-play to complete and in true survival horror fashion it's sometimes best to just run away or face death. The quests themselves are quite varied too, the side-quests are all simple fetch type quests bu remain fun due to the exploring, and the main plot has some fantastically intense and bloody set pieces.
Death to be fair, is something that will happen frequently in Dead Island, until you get a firm grip on your chosen character you will die a great deal, specifically on the second act which cranks up the difficulty. Fortunately there is little penalty to dying and you will soon be thrown back into the game where you were, a little lighter on money but able to dive back in with little frustration. A few times you respawn on other enemies and die instantly but this fortunately does not happen "that" much. Once you learn your skills and get a grip on the various games weapons things to get a bit easier though and by Act 3 I had a firm grip on things.
The weapons you use to battle the zombies are a great variety from katana's to shotguns to oars to hammers, the game does focus more on melee rather than guns but as it fun to slice or smash your way through undead at close range, that's fine. The weapons need to be constantly repaired with money, and can be upgraded to do more damage and even modified into super-weapons using blueprints and materials found around the world. Later in the game you can hold a big arsenal of electric weapons, exploding weapons, one with spinning blades and other modified nastiness all of which are amazing fun. It is also possible to enter a "Rage" mode where the zombies glow red for a short time and you can one-shot them, useful when in tight situations. The combat itself is so much fun, and so wonderfully violent it literally never gets dull. It's disturbingly good fun to see your slow motion kills as a zombies limb flies past your face.
Leveling up is done by gaining experience to gain new skills, while at first this does not seem that helpful as the monsters scale with you the later abilities do give you a big advantage and are a joy to see in action, the game after all is all about killing and he higher the body count you can create in spectacular ways, the better.
While I have spent a great time on this review singing the games praises but the game does have its flaws mainly crippling bugs and technical issues. The game has been patched but out of the box there is a chance for game-save corruption, weapons deleting and other nastiness. I myself experienced a bug where if I selected a side-quest and save and quit, when I logged in the quest would teleport me to its conclusion and sometimes auto-complete. To remedy this I made sure I selected the main quest when I saved and quit (this didn't seem to be effected by the glitch) but that was an un-needed annoyance. The game suffers from texture pop-up, occasional frame rate drops, shocking voice acting and occasionally unintelligible cutscenes (sometimes they were so badly done I had no idea what had happened) but at it's core I can so easily forgive Dead Island for its short comings because everything else is just brilliant.
From beginning to end Dead Island is a roller-coaster ride that will grip you and carry you through it's annoyances to its bloody conclusion with hordes of undead dismembered at your feet. It's an adventure worth going on maybe even a second time for a New Game+ and has an outstanding multiplayer mode I need to play more of. Whether on your on or with four friends this is one of the best games of 2011 thus far.