Dead Island

Have you ever had a rough night after which you wake up with a killer headache, mysterious scars and wearing pants that don't belong to you? I had a similar experience in Dead Island, except I woke up and everyone was fucking zombies. What the hell did I do last night!? Wait, I was a male when I went to bed, so I'm either wearing women's clothing or I switched fucking genders last night. As much as I wish these were just humorous punchlines, they're actually my experience entering into Dead Island. I wish I were fucking joking about this shit.


In my mind I have trouble imagining a scenario in which I'm given free reign to kill zombies with improvised weapons which I don't enjoy. How can it possibly go wrong? I've got weapons and zombies; it's a classic match made in heaven. Zombies are about the last creature that it's socially acceptable to slaughter en masse (except for Nazis and contrived hybrids of the two.) My expectations for the game were not high; I expected zombies and shit. Colour me fucking surprised when what I got was the least fun game I'd played this year. I want to avoid witty ambiguity here just because I care about you: Do not play or purchase Dead Island. It is awful and you will regret it even more than if you wanted to find out what would happen if you tried to burn your pubes off.

The easiest way for me to coherently explain what exactly Dead Island is would be telling you which games it blatantly fucking copy-pastes its mechanics from. It's basically Dead Rising 2 set on the island from Far Cry (with the shitty vehicle mechanics too) with the melee combat of Oblivion and the quest and looting systems of Fallout. It even hijacks the workbenches straight out of Dead Rising. To be honest, these are all solid mechanics; I take no issue with games using tried and true mechanics because those mechanics work. The problem here stems from the fact that they executed nothing even half as well as the games that 'inspired' the mechanics. The combat is bland and samey, the weapons are all just variations of broken sticks and the modifications are basically "put nails in broken sticks." At one point I got fed up with the bullshit questlines and decided to go explore the island to see if I could find some guns or something cool, what I found was 4 shovels and infinite rowboat oars. Seriously, give me some fucking interesting weapons.


The inevitable RPG element of Dead Island is a level up system allowing you to allocate points into skill trees. A majority of the skills are fucking stupid and a waste of time. You gain XP by killing zombies, with the combat being slightly RPG-esque too. You're supposed to get extra damage for hitting the head or crippling the legs, but the system is very moody and occasionally jamming your level 10 "tiring stick" straight in the face of the zombie results in him smiling and proceeding to... punch you to death. Occasionally zombies will also grab you and try to bite you, resulting in a quicktime event with the same stupid fucking combination every time. I know I shouldn't be complaining though, because having a different combination would be even more of a pain in the ass. Did they even play this fucking game during production?


By far the worst thing about this game is the story. It's so poor that I can literally sum it up in this sentence: You're on an island and then suddenly zombies. To be honest, they're not even very cool zombies. Yeah they eat corpses and chase the living and shit but they're always laying down like it's naptime on zombie kindergarten island or some shit. 


Dead Island also revealed to me a slightly frightening reality; I was looting peoples suitcases before I even knew the were zombies around. I guess it's a real indicator of my stability when you realise that there doesn't even have to be undead preying upon the living before I'll go through your bag and steal 30 phones, 6 rolls of duct tape, a magnet and make a weapon out of them. Want to hang out?


Being set in a resort on a tropical island, I probably should have foreseen bikinis inbound, but literally every fucking female in this game is wearing a bikini. Girl holed up in a gas station basement, defending herself with a rusty shovel? Bikini. Girl in the middle of shooting a porno? Bikini. Girl on a billboard selling a watch? Bikini. Even the female zombies have bikinis.


I'm really struggling for paragraphs to write at this point, it's difficult to find the words to capture the true, horrible essence that is Dead Island. I guess it speaks volumes about the experience to say that Dead Island is the first game in years that I literally could not bring myself to finish, even for journalistic purposes; it was too fucking unpleasant. This coming from the guy who got third degree burns on his ass, and on a separate occasion was completely on fucking fire.


Dead Island was a sloppy game that brought no innovation, poor combat, abysmal storyline and managed to take one of the easiest fun experiences and make it not fun. Overall I'd give it 4 out of 10 potential fucks given.

I hope I never have to play that shit again.