Dead Island es un juego bastante ambicioso y lleno de muchas ideas que a la larga logran conectar, entregando una experiencia bastante interesante e inmersiva. La Definitive Edition mejora muchos aspectos gráficos y con un mundo visualmente más atractivo, logra una mayor compenetración entre todas las características técnicas del juego, que, si bien está cuidadosamente desarrollado en muchos aspectos, palidece en otros tales como opciones de combate y una que otra característica de usabilidad. La historia como tal no es nada del otro mundo, sin embargo, es lo suficientemente interesante para instarnos a seguir explorando un mundo abierto que puede parecer sencillo a simple vista pero que premia a los jugadores que deciden recorrerlo y enfocarse de vez en cuando a terminar alguna de las muchas misiones secundarias. Es una buena experiencia de supervivencia, probablemente no la mejor, pero si una bastante prometedora.

Somewhat enjoyable romp through a zombie-infested tropical paradise. Easy to see how and where Techland went on to improve with Dying Light but the core gameplay loop is still fun enough... for a while. It throws next to no new mechanics or ideas at you past the first half-hour of gameplay. Luckily though, the hack and slash close-quarters first person combat is almost enough to sustain enjoyment through the entire 12-14 hour campaign playtime.

Played through solo but it's clear to see this was made to be enjoyed as a co-op experience, particularly with all 4 players wreaking havoc. With anything less it starts to outstay its welcome long before the end. Forgettable narrative with some admittedly intriguing moments and fun characters with unique abilities and tactics make Dead Island a game worth visiting and re-visiting with 3 other friends.

Solo however? You're much better off with their successor series - Dying Light.

6/10

This game feels like the textbook definition of the phrase “a product of its time”

Dead Island as a premise is interesting, and the execution of the environments and even the overall world design is well made and very fascinating. The actual game on the other hand is not.

This is not a horror game, this is a co-op RPG, complete with experience points, a level up system and enemy stats. You even get damage numbers popping up when you attack enemies. With that said, being a co-op game this would likely be more fun with friends but like Dead Space 3, I don’t have any friends to play with, nor do I have any friends who would voluntarily WANT to play this anyway.

The melee combat is a sight to behold. It starts out kind of ok when you first start up the game but the further you go in, the more unreliable and ham-fisted it becomes. The weapons operate with gun physics meaning you have the potential to be precise with how you aim your weapon but the execution is so broken it’s hard to actually pull it off intentionally. When you factor in multiple infected at a time it’s nearly impossible to deal with them all with how you drunkenly flail your arms around trying desperately to keep them off you. The kick attack is ironically more powerful than actual weapons in many circumstances seeing as how it does a great job at stun-locking infected and it can deal critical damage on grounded enemies. The enemies are your typical zombie fodder but the “bosses” you encounter are beyond frustrating. Not because they’re hard or anything, they’re really not, but because if they so much as lightly tap you on the shoulder you end up spiraling down onto the floor and the game forces you to take a solid minute to awkwardly get back up. You’d be surprised how much this occurs.

There’s also this “fury” ability you get from charging a meter. Activating it feels clunky and unintuitive but it’s essentially an instakill attack you can use on multiple enemies. Nothing to write home about.

The game takes place on a tropical resort complete with giant hotels, pools, beaches and beachside resorts. The atmosphere and setting are great and are super unique compared to most zombie games I played. It also has the benefit of containing an ingenious setup for looting in a zombie apocalypse (the people who vacationed here have brought tons of luggage, and screw it they’re not using any of it, they’re zombies. Loot away).

The world design is also pretty solid. Landmarks are memorable, plenty of ways to traverse the island quickly (even fast travel is offered at designated locations) and there’s a lot of freedom to where you can go and where you can’t.

Being an open world game of course, you get side quests…a lot of them. Side quests are I guess, standard for a kind of game like this, but that’s just what they are: quests to do on the side. Something to do later that supplements the main story. Dead Island’s biggest issue is that…this is all there is. The entire game, and I genuinely mean the ENTIRE GAME is nothing but side quests. Even the main objectives you need to do to advance the story? Treated exactly like side quests, just meaningless busywork to fulfill a certain quota. “Go over to this location to get something then bring it back here. Ok now do the exact same thing with this OTHER object at this OTHER location.” It hardly feels like I’m contributing to anything at all. You pick one of 4 main protagonists, they’re remarkably shallow and pretty stereotypical but outside of their little backstory blurb at the very beginning of the game, that’s all their character gets. No arc, no personality, no anything: they become soulless puppets for you to control and for others to have do their bidding.

Besides combat the other major gameplay addition Dead Island brings to the table is crafting. You collect a bunch of materials scattered around, find bases, find blueprints and you can craft a whole bunch of stuff. I don’t know if this is a hot take personally but outside of Minecraft I genuinely cannot STAND crafting mechanics in games like this. I just feel so overwhelmed with options, most of which I don’t even know if they’re meaningful or useful at all, and I just get assaulted with all this text and menu scrolling that at that point, I just don’t care anymore. I’ll put nails on a bat and call it a day, I’d rather just get new weapons organically through gameplay or find them fully intact lying around. Also weapon durability is here and it’s not necessarily a hinderance seeing as how you can repair them and use them again (I don’t even think they can break) but that just feels like a solution to a made up problem.

With the story side quest filled progression, the awful melee combat, the crafting and constant scavenging, I just could not bring myself to finish this game. It bored me to tears, and while it isn’t the worst game I’ve played by a LONG shot (heck I’ve arguably worse “””horror””” games than this one anyway), why would I continuously subject myself to an experience I completely lost interest in? Just to say I did it? I’d rather play something I would have fun with than be stuck trying to finish this game, and apparently this game goes on for dozens more hours so maybe I made the right choice in that department. Will I ever come back and finish this? Yeah probably, but it won’t be for a very long time.

Games I Like That Everybody Else Dislikes

Game = 3.5 stars.
"Who Do You Voodoo?" = 5 stars.
Objectively a far 'superior' game to Dead Island Riptide: Definitive Edition, but I prefer the latter for how much more it serenades me with its shittiness. Though naturally this is still glitchy, ghastly, messy, and downright unfinished enough to be a fun laughing stock. Even on a second runthrough I still can't believe how much wasted potential this has - because I do truly believe there are nuance to the environments here, particularly the beautiful resort literally made to be pristine tourist eye candy turned into an abandoned wasteland of death and destruction. But of course they opt to do next to nothing with them except use them as mere window dressing for what I consider to be the tentpole of godawful pointless-fetch-quest open world non-storytelling which current blockbuster releases like Cyberpunk 2077 have all but fully digested. Rock-solid dumb fun, just play in moderation or your brain will turn to mush.

I love horror games and especially ones that feature zombies in them. Having played games like Dead Rising and Dying Light, I figured Dead Island was right up my alley. Who doesn't want to go around killing zombies in a fancy tropical island resort?

Let's start by going over the story telling of the game. The narrative in this game doesn't do much different than any other zombie story. Zombie outbreak happens and you as the player have to go around saving survivors, getting supplies, and finding a way off the island. Pretty basic stuff.

I'll be honest I didn't like the four main characters, the side characters or the plot of this game. I couldn't stand any of the main characters and I absolutely HATED the dialog among them during the cut scenes and part of that was because the voice acting was god awful. I started to dread seeing any cut scenes in this game because all they did was annoy me. Maybe I'm being a little mean, but I felt the protagonists reminded me of the characters from the Fast and Furious films. I had a hard time taking anything that they said or did seriously which wouldn't have been a problem if the game itself wasn't trying to be so serious, and was going for more of a Dead Rising vibe.

Sadly, it was not just the main characters that got on my nerves however, it was also the NPCs. Maybe it had to do with how bad the graphics were, how their creepy eyes didn't blink, or the annoying voice acting, but I couldn't stand to listen to them speak and ended up skipping almost all the dialog so I didn't have to interact with them which is an extremely rare thing for me to do. Plus, I think it was also because all the side quests were just normal tedious stuff that had nothing interesting to offer story wise. It was the same old stuff like get supplies, kill random enemies, get someone some insulin, etc. These quests didn't expand on the story of the main plot or add any interesting back story to any of these characters. I felt so disconnected from the them that when there were a few rare moments of sadness, it was always short lived because either the main characters would say something completely cringy, or something stupid happened plot wise in the game.

Honestly, with how annoying both the characters and NPCs were, all it did was make me not care about the plot as a whole. I couldn't care less if any of the characters made it out alive at all. I strongly disliked these characters so much that I wasn't particularly driven to do the quests for the main story. I'm not saying that a game should be heavily story driven, but if there is going to be some plot involved I want to a least like and care about the characters that I'm playing or even interacting with. Sadly....this game fails to do that in every way.

Dead Island does what most open world RPGs do and that's explore the world, loot items, gain experience from both quests and enemies, and unlock skills from the skill tree. Each of the four main characters offer their own skills and special Fury ability, like using knives or guns and this affects what skills will be on the skill tree. Nothing too complicated.

As far as the combat, it feels bipolar. One minute it's a blast to play other times it is almost rage inducing. The aiming is so unreliable in this game even when it's suppose to be auto locked like one second I'm throwing weapons around like a damn ninja and than the next I'm throwing my weapon like I've had too much to drink. It's always random when it happens and it is really frustrating when the aim fails when encountering groups of zombies, especially if there are more powerful and faster zombies in the group. The guns in this game feel about useless outside of killing humans and basic zombies even when fully upgraded. Even the leveling system feels pointless when the enemies level up with you. In fact, when reaching around level 25 some enemies can pretty much kill you in one hit and the game offers no armor to protect your character and your best bet is to pretty much run over the enemies with a car. The game also penalizes the player every time they die by taking a certain percentage of the money you've found and if you died via looters they take both money and bullets. So that left me feeling a little salty.

They do give the player the option of being able to craft, upgrade, and repair your weapons at a crafting table. Sadly, weapons don't last very long in this game unless you unlock an ability in the skill tree and those are usually only for one type of weapon. Even with upgrading, it doesn't increase durability. So between modifying, repairs, and upgrading it can be pretty expensive and money isn't actually easy to accumulate in this game.

Overall:

My final thoughts are the gameplay portion is mediocre at best and with the story being so awful there wasn't much driving me to finish the game. In fact in the middle of act 3 I eventually just ended up getting so frustrated with the game that I just uninstalled it. The game does have co-op so that could help with the gameplay aspect, but personally I had such a miserable time with this game I'll more than likely never play it again to find out if it helps with making the game more enjoyable to play. It's very hard to recommend this game and honestly if you're looking for an open world RPG zombie game than play Dying Light instead. It's made by the same team and while Dying Light has it's own flaws it's much more enjoyable to play.

Pros:
+customizable weapons
+some interesting locations
+co-op

Cons:
-terrible characters and story
-mediocre combat
-certain enemies are way too over powered
-game drags and becomes boring

This is the best game I didn't play in 2011.

Back then, I was a teen who loved the postapocalyptic zombie setting. Playing Left 4 Dead with friends. Eagerly waiting for another The Walking Dead episode (both TV show and the comic book). Basically doing everything to further indulge in the genre. Yet, I missed this game's release and all the hype surrounding it at the time. I played it for the first time in 2023, and it was such a nostalgic experience for me, that upon finishing it, I'm longing for those good old days.