Dead Island

The Good
- Nice cutscenes. - You can chop off individual body parts.

The Bad
- Story that doesn't go anywhere. - Boring characters. - Poor combat mechanics. - Weapons get damaged. - Repetitive gameplay. - Boring soundtrack.

The Bottom Line
Dead Island first gained a lot of attention when its first trailer was released and since then everybody has been hyping this game up like it was the next Half-Life. I got the game as soon as it was released and I was treated on yet another beautiful cutscene that served as the game's intro. However once gameplay took over everything collapsed rather fast.

The first thing that struck me as odd was that each character has his or her own specialization, but I knew for a fact that firearms were scarce, so why would you want to specialize in guns? I decided to specialize in throwing weapons, but as it turned out there weren't really any special weapons for that and it was just that, throwing your weapons at people. Apparently my character thought the best solution was to throw his only method of defense at enemies.

Another reason for me to pick the character was that he struck me as a selfish guy who didn't really care about people he doesn't know, meaning that he wouldn't have to go through hundreds of arbitrary quests. However even my character wasn't able to avoid having his log filled with loads of quests that largely involve annoying little fetch-quests for random people (like getting a family heirloom back) while they stay in the nearest base complaining about the situation. The story structure is very similar to Borderlands, so you just run around the world doing quests with no real connection to the main story (getting off the island), but the reason it worked in Borderlands was because of the humor and silly aesthetic, both of which Dead Island lacks.

The gameplay is not much better, the worst are the melee weapons which never seem to connect if your not looking directly at the enemy and it doesn't help that weapons get damaged during the fight, up to the point that they don't do any damage anymore or just break. This would be alright if this happened over time, but here it goes so fast that I often found myself sprinting back to the nearest workbench every two or three fights. Eventually I discovered that you can just kick enemies, a tactic that not only damages them, but also makes it impossible for them to do anything back.

The only part of the gameplay that I really liked was whenever I found a nice, sharp weapon, so I could chop off body-parts. There is nothing more hilarious then watching a rotting corpse run towards me with both its arms missing. If you found some nice blunt weapons you could also break body parts which gave the same result.

At the end of the day, Dead Island is just another forgettable zombie game, a game made by a company with no real significant titles under its name. Judging by the trailers and the intro this game had, I would advice them to find something else for the the programmers to do and just turn the company into a movie studio instead.

If you really want to play another zombie game and you can't wait for Left 4 Dead 3. Dead Rising 3, or any other game that involves murdering diseased humans, then this could keep you busy for a while, but it just isn't interesting enough to buy for any other reason.