His Review with Ian

You’re a little fuzzy, it’s the morning after the night before, all you can remember are the lyrics “Who do, the voodoo, b@!*h” and all the locals really want to do is get up close and personal with you. Sounds like a regular Friday night in Chipping Norton to me.

Dead Island, set on the achingly beautiful isle of Banoi, is a giant game of fetch and carry with a large dollop of zombies on every corner to either pummel or avoid. The plot, (who said plot?), is more flimsy than your first childhood toy and the single player experience is so frustrating, so repetitive and so unrewarding that several times I wanted to bite Tracey in an act of bloody uncontrollable rage.

Here’s the story. “You guys” (plural because all four of the playable characters are present and constantly referred to in the cheap and low-fi cut scenes even though it was just me playing which is irritating and did nothing to foster a closer relationship between me and the game) aren’t infected when bitten by the zombies, the island survivors are a bit scared to go out of their shed and fight the infected, so I have to kill every zombie so all the scaredy pusses can escape. Have fun waiting for reason why you don’t get infected to be revealed about 15 chapters in...

To start, you choose one of four “characters” (and in this game that term should be applied loosely) who specialise in edged, blunt, firearms or throwing weapons which you can enhance throughout the game on one or all of the three skill trees (rage, combat or survivor) on offer.

It plays out over four visually stunning acts (Beach Resort, Moresby City, Jungle and Prison) but the environments themselves and the interaction between character and landscape is close to nil. It is inert and so becomes little more than wallpaper which you find yourself not seeing after the initial sensational introduction to each setting.

With main and side quests on plentiful offer Dead Island offers you the chance to spend dozens of hours in this stagnant landscape. For the first 2 chapters I was fastidious, sticking my grubby little fingers everywhere, looting suitcases and bins, looking behind paintings and pilfering wallets to amass oodles of cash and an inventory that looked like a B&Q stock take (magnets, duct tape, nuts, bolts and hose pipe). These items become very useful when you start modifying your weapons at the variously sited work benches across the game. In fact this part of the game is a big bag of fun, I mean who doesn’t like a customised barbed wire cudgel? A word of warning though, with every zombie attack your weapon will deteriorate and slowly lose effectiveness until you repair them back at the workbench (repairs costs money). You also lose stamina with each swing of your arm, so random and frenetic flailing when cornered will just exhaust you and leave an easy target for those marauding zombies until you recover. Your only saviour is your feet. I lashed out a well pointed stiletto (I played as Xian with a full survivor skill tree and my choice of weapon was an electrified machete on Xbox 360) several times and this downs or causes easier zombies to stumble back for a second, but it’s enough time to gather a smidge more stamina for another well aimed attack.

The voice and accent work is shaky with either Australian or South African (sometimes both from the same character in the same sentence) on display and I even found a Scouser in the cells at the police station. However some of the audio design is better and works most effectively when building tension as marauding zombies come hurtling towards you, their guttural screams increasing in volume though you don’t know where they’re coming from until…boom, kick, slash – you either survive again or die in a puddle of blood.

There was none of the conceptual intelligence, rich emotion or character investment that was so evident in the cinematic trailer which swept across the internet earlier in the year (that interestingly wasn’t created by Deep Silver or Techland). Our review copy was also full of glitches and Tracey will be sharing her thoughts on this particular area. However, the publisher, Deep Silver has announced that there will be a day one patch with 38 fixes. So where we encountered NPC limbs popping through doors, characters you have to escort and protect not progressing (Ope and Yerma I’m looking at you) and some major respawning issues (350 metres away from site of death once), this patch should remedy these rhythm breaking issues.

Dead Island is not a fun or satisfying experience, there are little glimpses of light in the environmental artwork and weapons customisation but the awful game mechanics, plot - what plot? and the monotonous quests design, leave my blood a little thinner and a little less rich than before.

Her Review with Tracey

I heart zombies. Scaring myself silly whilst destroying zombies as they stagger and stumble around with chunks of flesh missing, thrills me and is an unrivalled past time. Here though instead of a captivating, emotive, and chilling survival horror ride, instead came hours of laborious tasks, predictable combat and a patchy thin story.

A deserted luxury hotel with marbled floors and spectacular views over golden sandy beaches is where you shake off an almighty hangover. Hastily discarded luggage strewn across dark corridors sets the scene as you make your way to the lobby. Suddenly a voice crackles to life over the security tannoy, telling you to run – run as quick as you can – they’re coming! If you can make your way to a beach hut where a scraggle of survivors have gathered you might be okay… It’s a frantic test of quick reactions and holding your nerve as with heart pounding, you race into the sunshine towards fellow survivors but sadly, the pace and intrigue die quicker than a zombie on fire as soon as you reach said beach hut. Sinamoi, head lifeguard on the island bumbles something about seeing you get bitten yet you’re not a zombie. You can still die if the infected beat you up but could you do us all a favour and spend the next 6 hours fetching us stuff so we can all survive. In the meantime, we’ll just hide behind these flimsy bamboo doors…

From the first mission the context and world you interact with is skewed and instantly removes any enjoyment or anxiety that comes from fighting zombies. Going up against insurmountable odds, the unpredictability of where zombies might be lurking in the resort and caring at all about surviving is firstly ruined by the knowledge that you can’t be infected and that your main mission is to save everyone else rather than yourself. How noble and how very boring. It’s not like your character has anything in common with these demanding tourists. Fetching a teddy bear for a grown woman, finding someone’s missing husband or collecting juice for the demanding folks around the island in exchange for some piddling cash or XP just isn’t fun. Secondly, the environment is so ridiculously contradictory. You can rip a pipe from a wall and collect driftwood to hit zombies but you can’t dismantle beach umbrellas or throw bar stools. The delight of finding a roll of barbed wire, carelessly left behind in a beach changing hut or uncovering a roll of duct tape and a flexible hose in a discarded suitcase (standard and essential holiday items?) is dispelled as you can’t instantly wrap it round a stick to create a weapon of mass destruction. You’ve got to find a workbench and have cash to combine items. Take care not to spend your time and money on a weapon that will only last you 10 mins unless you want to have a little annoyed face like mine. Getting to work with upgraded blades and bats does result in some epically gory and unadulterated brutality and is essential if you want to progress – a flimsy boat paddle ain’t gonna get you very far.

As for the stereotypical characters you get to play, (black gangsta one hit wonder rapper complete with bling, headscarf and attitude, ex-professional NFL star with mowhawk, tattoos and a big fat ego, female Chinese receptionist or scantily clad security chick) all have some secret demons from their past that it’s hard to care about as it has little bearing on the game. Though you play as a solo character, supposedly the four characters are working together though this is unclear with no introductory cut scenes, nor any dialogue between them until a good few hours in. Even then, the cut scenes are obvious, blunt and brief. Those moments of immersive joy hunting down life saving supplies, whilst taking on the bloody infected are broken whenever all four characters are shown, usually bickering over what to do. It leaves you with a sense of simply going through the motions rather than actively making cohesive moral decisions or appearing to have accomplished something/anything apart from yet more mindless zombie mashing. You never feel part of a team, nor do you feel emboldened by going it alone. It’s a weird mix that for me doesn’t work.

At any time in the game you can join or be joined by up to 3 other players online. The co-op is seamless, yet the sudden appearance of 2 identical stealing vital items at crucial moments in your game is heartbreaking, even if they do help you take on a hoard of zombies that otherwise would have been impossible. The game will automatically find online players characters (strangely everyone I played with was NFL dropout Logan) roughly at the same point in the story line as you though I found when I joined them, the game was fooled into thinking I’d completed a load of missions I’ve never come across and spat me out at a point in the future. In fact glitches totally ruined my experience and I’m glad Ian reports that there will be a much needed fix from Deep Silver on release. Zombies appearing through concrete walls, bushes sweeping through the car as I zoomed around, obscuring my view and causing me to crash and during the main quest, a small but important action of a door opening failed to happen. I’d ruined my weapons killing countless undead, drank every energy drink in the area just to stay alive and was forced to reload from the last save point. Any time you die you lose cash and I respawned miles away with my inventory still severely depleted then to add insult to injury had to use vital items en route to the mission start only to be catapulted onto the next chapter which was in an entirely different location! Forget suicide exploding zombies or spitting zombies – I was so enraged I became the scariest thing in the room.

Forget too about simply exploring the isle (or as Ian refers to it, the playing area), unless you like unnecessarily wasting weapons, money and heaps of time or just like driving over zombies. Elsewhere the side quests are shallow, repetitive, often weirdly unrealistic and very strict in terms of how to complete them. Need to collect 2 cans of petrol for a guy whose life you’ve just saved whilst he stood by and watched? No problem - as long as you do it from a specified garage. Try going to fill up at the garage you’ve just visited on a previous mission and you’ll find this time you can’t interact with the petrol cans. Oh no, you have to visit another garage on the other side of the island to collect your cans – WHY??? When you do finally drop them off, you can guarantee you’ll be asked to collect another item that you could have got on your way. Lazy long missions/chores are standard fodder whilst revisiting areas and taking on the same enemies time and again soon becomes frustrating as the rewards are paltry.

Sticking to the main quest became dull too. Zombies either hobble or rage towards you and as satisfying as it is to cleanly decapitate or stomp on their heads, there’s very little variation as once on the floor, every zombie sounds like a cat on the boil. Several savage kicks, followed by a swing of a wrench and they stagger back giving you time to recover and hit them again and again and again for good measure. Timing your swing to take their arms off is fun but beware, some zombies headbutt you right back! You can chuck weapons at them or set them alight but they all behave in the same way and zombies in Bermuda shorts just ain’t scary. With no atmospheric soundtrack, you can hear them coming a mile away so can always ready yourself or choose to avoid them by sprinting. They look horrifically menacing and threre’s always one that will get you from behind when the hoard descends. With bones and guts sticking and spilling out but they’re dumb and never pose too much of a challenge, despite the combat system failing wildly with strikes frequently missing their targets.

Ultimately, a catalogue of little glitches and annoying peculiarities, repetitive combat and unrealistic or lacklustre storyline/situations added up to make me angry and more often than not, I was craving some depth or emotive connection as a break from the relentless slaughter. We’re reminded in the latter stages of the game that these zombies were co-workers, tourists, perhaps even friends but by then, as the mystery of why you can’t be infected becomes the focus, their rotting, chopped up corpses are already tomorrows compost. By the time the rather unmemorable and predictable ending rolled around, my will to live was just as eroded. If you find mindless violence fun and playing with crazy mad weapons can sustain your interest for 30 hours, visit Banoi this season but I found Dead Island, dead disappointing.

Dead Island is released on 9th September on Xbox360, PS3 and PC.