Zero Zombie Zugzwang
This is my "ain't even finished it yet" review of Dead Island for the Xbox 360. I feel like I have shit to say about it as of right now, so here we go.
So here's the deal: I am conflicted about this game. Yes, I like it on some levels (the levels that horrific violence appeal to, generally) and I am fully willing to accept that by playing the game solo, I'm missing out on some things. I can get behind that.
On the other hand, this game does some things that make me want to punch the designers.
So what's the verdict - and why?
No Obvious Exits From An Island
Let's start with a synopsis of the plot. Banoi (BAH-nu-EE) is an island off the coast of Papua New Guinea, which is basically the Casablanca of Oceania: people come to Banoi to forget, to start their lives over, be a tourist or else just to get fucked up ninety ways to Sunday and let it all hang out. So a collection of misfits (okay, three misfits and an Alleged Concierge) happen to gather at the Royal Palms Resort one slamming weekend. And then all fucking hell comes loose. And tries to eat you.
Short story short, you wake up with your clothes all jacked up (no explanation for why Xian Mei's uniform is tore up or why exactly Purna wore combat boots, knives and a police pistol belt to the opening cinematic dance party) and in a hotel full of zombies. Everything has gone to a cannibalistic apocalypse in a hand basket, and no explanation is given for how you were able to doze peacefully through the entire island infrastructure imploding under the assault of hordes of undead. When you see the extent of the destruction, you will assume you were either out for a damned long time (which does not jive with events following your awakening) or else time is passing at a ridiculous rate (which is somewhat borne out by NPC statements about food you just fucking delivered). Turns out you're immune, and that means that you are now an entire population of survivors' favorite team of errand runners. Take that, superior immune system.
Dead Island gives you four characters to choose from: scrappy half-Aborigine vaguely-man-hating ex-cop turned bodyguard Purna; washed up pro football star, human trainwreck and mild-to-moderate douchebag Logan; fading one hit wonder, top-hat enthusiast and rapper Sam B; and mild-mannered Chinese concierge (spoiler: super-spy) Xian Mei. Purna is skilled with guns and serves as the 'leader,' providing buffs to her party of survivors; Logan is the jack of all trades, has a good arm and throws stuff; Sam B is the Resident Big Black Man who has a knack for blunt instruments (not guns though, shockingly enough) and Xian Mei, being Chinese, knows kung fu, obviously. (Okay, fine, she's a super-spy assassin or whatever. If you don't have the preview comic to tell you that, you just assume that she is a concierge who was previously a cop who is handy with a shiv and knows kung fu. Due to being Chinese.)
The game is designed around a multiplayer mechanic: While all characters are good at slaughtering the approximately 8,000,000 undead on this fucking little island, each brings a specialty to your crew that is hard to do without. Sam B is the tank, able to absorb more punishment than the other characters; Xian Mei is a glass cannon whose skill with blades can leave zombies in bloody meat-chunks all over the landscape in seconds; Logan has stand-off ability with his thrown weapons talents, can get minor bonuses with all weapon types, and can spec to get stat bonuses from being drunk off his ass; and Purna's rage-fueled leadership bolsters the crew's abilities. She's also hot shit with a pistol which will eventually become much more useful. Also she gets an ability that gives her damage bonuses against male opponents. It tactfully describes the “Sex War” ability as giving an advantage against “opponents of the opposite sex” but I don't recall there being an option to play a male Purna, so this is somewhat pointless semantics.
This game is not meant to be soloed. If you're going to solo it and you want to avoid some frustration (more on that in a second) then you want to be Sam B. With health regeneration and increasing toughness to injury, the RBBM can better survive the brutal, unrelenting asskicking you're about to experience.
Now, to fight back against the hordes of undead assholes out to peel off your face and wear it as a cute little hat, you have basically any vaguely weapon-shaped piece of whatever you can find at your disposal, from diving knives to boat paddles to baseball bats (very popular on an island with no fucking baseball diamond anywhere, actually) to whatever depraved nonsense you cobble together with scavenged parts, from electrified blades to stunning axes to poisoned machetes to a baseball bat with a circular saw built in. While these “augmented” weapons are actually kind of worthless (more on that in the next section) they are pretty entertaining. Oh, and maintaining a long tradition of “really should have thought that through better,” the game happily gives me occasional opportunity to set shit on fire. In fact, the molotovs, incendiary grenades and propane tanks they provide are spectacular ways to kill roughly a city block of zombified shitheads in a colossal foon-ball. Weapons come in grades with cute little names the meaning of which I truly have not tried to figure out yet, in classic RPG fashion (as of MMOs anyway) and with level requirements (“Can't... swing... axe... must... get more buff... from... killing zombies and doing chores... hnnnn...”) and varying degrees of usefulness. Some characters get special bonuses for using certain weapons based on a character affinity for their use, and your abilities with them can be modified with the various Combat, Fury and Survival abilities that you can specialize in as you level.
So where is the drawback to this weapon-based mayhem? Oh, right...
It. All. Fucking. Breaks.
Zen and the Art of Machete Maintenance
There will come a point where you realize that you are spending a lot of money in this game keeping your favorite machete polished and the nails unbent on your preferred spiked baseball bat. I have literally pissed thousands of in-game dollars up the wall on weapon repairs. You want to bitch about the stupid deteriorating weapon mechanics in Fallout 3/FONV or Elder Scrolls? You don't know shit. These goddamn weapons drop tens of percents of condition every time you shank a single opponent. You stroll out of a safe zone with your zombie-cleaving razor-edged machete, get into one brawl with four Walkers, and your blade drops to 80% condition with a bent tip, chipped blade, and some very fucked up looking red goo all over the mangled edge. While curb-stomping your foes with your almighty kick attack saves on weapon condition (or even better, the stomp attack), by level 15 it was taking me a full minute to kick just one downed zombie to death. You essentially have to focus on taking them out as fast as possible: slice off a head or arm as quickly as you can, because the more you whale on the undead the faster (and I mean that it is fucking fast) your weapons will creep towards oblivion.
This, by the way, happens constantly even with special abilities that reduces the wear and tear on weapons by tens of percents, fully maxed out.
I hate weapon deterioration. It's a stupid concept that never gets portrayed in a way that is in the slightest bit believable. How, exactly, does one wear out a fucking crowbar bludgeoning slightly-rotted humans with it? It's made of steel. It is made of one piece of steel, in fact. Have you ever, even once in your life, ever managed to bend a crowbar out of shape? I bet you haven't because they are not meant to bend. Chopping things that are softer than wood with an axe does not make the goddamn handle disintegrate within a matter of minutes. How about brass knuckles? They're made of one piece of metal. About two inches worth of material ever actually makes contact with your target. How do you beat a pair of brass knuckles to shit like that by punching zombies in the yob? You don't.
Incidentally, firearms, weapons which do in fact require pretty constant maintenance, never wear out. Figure that fucker out, if you can.
Weapon modification fucks your gear up even more. The game helpfully provides you with an arsenal of insane things you can learn to do to your gear, from sticking nails into a baseball bat to fitting your favorite machete with a device that electrocutes as it slices (The critical hit from such a weapon sends a zombie into spastic convulsions covered with arcing electricity. I call it “the Crit Dance.”) to wrapping a baton in fuel-soaked bandages and setting it ablaze to the Special Edition only mod, the Ripper. The Ripper turns a normal baseball bat into an abnormal battery-powered circular saw mounted on a weighted haft. It's demented and weird.
However, nearly every modification you make will reduce the durability of a weapon (after all you are sticking nails in things, attaching makeshift power tools to bats, etc) which means they wear out even faster. You have pay to upgrade weapons (which makes them stronger and less busted-ass looking) and to repair them and to modify them and to repair them again after you modify them (yes, it damages them to modify them) so you end up spending thousands on each weapon. The better the quality of your gear, the more money it costs to repair them. Spend too long roaming the streets and you'll come home with nigh-destroyed equipment and a wallet that is begging your forgiveness.
This becomes something of an issue when you arrive in the City of Moresby...
Welcome to Moresby, You Tasty Chump
The resort where the game starts out is a shockingly beautiful place, with post card vistas of white sand and blue ocean. Banoi is in Oceania as I mentioned, and Oceania is a goddamn gorgeous place. Being a resort, it has a sexy hotel with sexy architecture, secluded bungalows, gallons of blood everywhere, and a few thousand psychotic sons of bitches that want to eat your flesh. More on them in a moment.
Then you modify a bank truck (yes, one of those big armored things you associate with Brinks) into The Misery Wagon, an armored brute of a vehicle capable of bursting through hordes of zombies and debris-clogged tunnels and set out for the City of Moresby inland to look for supplies.
And you roll that big ass truck right into the motherfucking hellish offspring of Baghdad, Mogadishu, Monrovia, the entire Green Zone and Land of the Dead. Moresby is what you'd expect a ghetto overrun with zombies to look like. Cramped, narrow streets littered with wrecked cars, burning dumpsters and makeshift barricades erected by desperate survivors; barriers set up by the Australian version of the CDC, a tent clinic full of bastard undead; and roving packs of psychotics with guns (which I will also address momentarily). You find a church under siege by the undead, roll up your sleeves and prepare to get your ass stomped.
Oh yes, it will be stomped.
In the resort there are a few hundred zombies here there and everywhere. You rarely encounter extremely large packs of the undead and you can generally guess about where they'll be before they attack. You find scattered individuals and every once in a while a pack (usually on a quest or hassling a barricaded survivor).
In Moresby there are more zombies on every street than there are in the entire resort, I think. You can't walk ten feet in Moresby without tripping over a pack of man-eating assholes. They are literally everywhere, all the time. The minute you step out of a safe zone (I've found three so far) you will be up to your nipples in blood. Solo, I spend most of my time sprinting from location to location to complete the various quests in the area. With another player, I have to wade through the undead, killing as I go, because other people do not seem to understand the urgency of getting the fuck out of Dodge before Dodge fucks you raw.
Moresby is terrible. The quests are all rated Hard or Very Hard, except for a couple random ones rated Medium... which brings us to...
Your Quest Difficulty Sits On A Throne of Lies
… some bullshit. Some. Bullshit.
Some asshole rated some of the quests in Moresby as being of “Medium” difficulty. That is a blatant lie. They take place in the same hellish ghetto with the same unending stream of motherfuckers out to eat you. In fact one of the quests rated “Medium” takes you to the clinic. I have no idea what is actually in the clinic. It doesn't matter. What the clinic is, is bullshit. It is a never-ending assembly line of pain. Essentially an infinite number of “Infected” type enemies spawn there. Infected have a homing sense. They know where you are and will come to you. They are terrible.
The quest difficulties and attached experience point values are silly as hell in this game. You can never be sure what exactly you're going to get. Some easy quests are just that: really easy. And usually the quests marked “Hard” are understating it a little. But in Moresby, the quests are fucking liars. Tedious liars that require you to trudge through miles and miles of hellish streets for no other reason than their own sick amusement. Even fast traveling (and bless the pointy head of whatever genius gave you that option) doesn't really relieve you from the burden of the very chore-like quests in this section of the game.
The Science of the Cheap Shot and the Art of Vicious Dismemberment: Combat and the Enemies of Dead Island
The undead in Dead Island are divided into classes of critter. The most common are the Walkers, who are your basic flesh-eating undead Romero zombie. They stagger about, vaguely aware of your presence, and can speed up to a shambling trot when they're excited. They like to punch you in the face, but some are tool users and carry weapons. These can do an amazing amount of damage in a hurry. Oh, and sometimes they get an idea of sorts in their rotten brains and throw their weapons at you, so that's fun too.
The worst part about Walkers is their lunge attack. This forces you to grapple with the undead, bashing the trigger buttons until you cold-cock it in the mouth and get it off of you. Overall the Walkers aren't hard to kill and are satisfying to slash, burn, electrocute and curb-stomp messily, but like every undead in the game, you cannot reliably interrupt their attacks even if you use your stunning kick move or manage to land an instant death blow by decapitating the zombie, or even if you cut off or break the arm that was going for you. Zombies can always interrupt your attacks, including your kick on occasion. Essentially most of the damage you take in Dead Island will come from cheap attacks you can't prevent from connecting. I've developed a tendency to swat zombies then jump back from them to make sure they don't connect.
Less common (until you reach the hell that is Moresby) are the Infected. If Walkers are classic Romero zombies, then Infected are the new Romero zombie: running, climbing, screeching assholes. Why these are called that I am unsure of, since I assume that this is the standard issue plague-based undead epidemic - it's spread through bites - so why some are Walkers and some are Infected, I do not know. The Walkers do seem to be more mangled than the Infected, generally speaking. Infected can't take a lot of damage; one or two good hits will generally shut one down. What they do well, however, is come screaming out of nowhere (they scream, you see, continuously, it's very annoying) and beat the shit out of you. The Infected attack by windmilling their arms as they run, and since you can't interrupt a zombie's attack, if you don't stop it with a perfectly timed decapitation or kick in the face, the Infected will land an unstoppable barrage of hits on your head. They are, bar none, the most annoying enemies in the game. The clinic in Moresby and everywhere near it are especially fun because of the unending stream of Infected that spawn from basically thin air and come sprinting at you to beat your ass.
The Thug is the first “tank” monster you fight. Basically the Thug is a huge black guy whose powerful physique has resulted in a sort of Super-Walker, about seven feet tall. He doesn't run and doesn't even do the fast lunge of the lesser Walker. Instead, what the Thug has is the ability to send you flying through the air with most of your life gone with a single swat. He typically roars and flails, swinging his arms at random. They're not really that hard to kill; keep your distance when he is flipping out, then close and try to disable his limbs before jumping back to avoid the counterattack. With two players, one can keep his attention while the other blithely rips him to pieces from the other direction.
Then we have the Suicider. You can tell that one is around by the constant “Ooooohhhhh... YEAAAAAAHHHH” noise that it makes (no really that's what it sounds like). They walk at a very slow, but relentless pace: a shambling, bloated mass of pulsating tumors that are probably tied for most disgusting thing in a game where I regularly turn skulls into hollow, vaguely-skull-like bloody wrecks. When a Suicider gets close enough or takes sufficient damage, it detonates, instantly dropping you to zero life. A well timed Suicider kill at a safe distance can destroy a pack of Walkers, though, so they are not without their uses. They will follow you any distance you care to go, but are easily evaded before the game sticks your ass in a seemingly endless series of sewers to travel to the Wealthy District of Moresby (which you see very little of since you're constantly in the sewers or in buildings).
Next up is the Ram. The Ram is an asshole. Basically somebody strapped a very, very big man into a combination straight jacket and bomb disposal armor, gave him giant steel-plated boots and a “Hannibal mask” and then he became a zombie. Why someone would do this, I do not know at this time. The Ram fights by charging at things and bowling them over, like the Charger from Left 4 Dead 2. The Ram needs about 6 inches to build up enough steam to send you flying through the air, and he does a horrible amount of damage. If you close with him before he is ready to charge, he generally just cranks back and gives you Das Boot and sends you skipping down Lollipop Lane with no teeth in your head. The Ram is only vulnerable from the back, which is handy if you happen to be playing Xian, who gets special abilities to do more damage from behind an enemy. She can quickly put down a Ram (so long as her weapon is in good condition) making him annoying (extremely annoying) but not actually as dangerous as the fucking Infected, who make me want to quit playing sometimes.
Tied with the Suicider for most vile thing you will see regularly in Dead Island is the Floater. Fortunately you don't see them too often. Basically, a Floater is a bloated corpse with a hollowed back (it's pretty gross) and translucent skin showing off internal organs (it's really gross) that pukes at you (it's really, really gross). Floater puke is flammable and they tend to spew at random, so you can find something to set zombies on fire with and ignite everything the fat bastard yarfed on. Basically the Floater is a non-zombie-attracting rip-off of the Boomer of Left 4 Dead, except they gave the detonating properties of the Boomer to the Suicider instead. Whee.
Lastly we have the Butcher. The zombie with kung fu. Essentially some asshole cut off a zombie's hands and sharpened the bones of the arm into blades, taught them kung fu, and sent them to the jungle to annoy the shit out of you. I've only manhandled one so far, and it wasn't terrible. I suspect this will get worse later when there are multiple of them. The Butcher sprints like an Infected, probably hits pretty hard what with the bone spikes, and likes to duck your head shots. This is annoying of him.
There are also human enemies, who generally have guns (nearly all of them have guns) and who are extremely annoying, generally shooting the shit out of you the first time you encounter them and occasionally turning Dead Island into a mediocre shooter. Generally the easiest way to handle humans is to shoot them in the head: they can take a shocking number of bullets to the body, so generally just obey the maxim of “Lead In The Head Makes It Dead.” It doesn't always work on the undead but it generally drops humans in their own shadow. Thunk.
However, as bothersome as the enemies and their cheap shots are, you do get some cool tricks to fight back with. Each character has three “trees” they can spend points into as they level: Combat, Survival and Fury. Fury provides the character with the ability to enter a sort of berserk state, gaining special advantages and attacks. Purna pulls out a gun and starts blazing away, providing buffs to the party as she does; Sam B puts on his brass knuckles and proceeds to slam zombies with haymaker punches that are (generally) instantly fatal; Xian goes on a super-fast knife-wielding rampage; and Logan takes out a supply of blades and hurls them at all enemies in view to deadly effect. Fury is generally a great way to handle things when the chips are down though it has the poor taste to be triggered by holding the same button that triggers a health kit so it doesn't always go off when you want it to. The Fury tree also gives easier ways to generate the “rage” that fuels the Fury mode (Purna can generate Fury by booting zombies around), improves Fury abilities (like extending duration and improving damage as a general one) in both general ways and ones unique to each character. Xian has abilities to increase her health and speed in Fury; Logan has one to extend the range of his thrown knives.
The Combat tree gives each character improved damage with their preferred weapons and even special moves such as Xian's wuxia-inspired leap attack and backstab (combined they do a ridiculous amount of damage) and the Stomp Move, which allows you to stomp the shit out of a downed opponent's head, killing them instantly. Sam and Xian favor one specific weapon type, whereas Purna is skilled to some extent with all weapons and especially with blades, and Logan can become skilled with to a lesser extent with all weapons, but especially one handed ones.
Survival provides each character with useful abilities like scrounging better stuff, taking less damage in combat, finding more money and the like. Combined the trees give you a good way to customize your own survivor and influences the group dynamic in combat. For example, when specializing the character Sam B., I focused on the Combat tree, and took an ability that gives Sam a punishing shoulder tackle move whenever he's running (which flings enemies aside on impact), whereas another player focused his more on general combat and survival techniques. This is definitely one of the best aspects of the game.
For the most part, combat against the undead is deeply satisfying when you are playing with friends. Alone it's a pain in the ass, especially in the city section of the game, but with a friend you can have a blast slicing off limbs, crushing skulls, and watching your elemental effects from toxic, poisonous, incendiary or electric weapons take hold on even hordes of hapless undead, leaving destruction in your wake. Cheap shots are annoying but fighting with the right mix of aggression and caution can minimize even that. I don't like the Infected and would happily see them gone from the game, but they are a small road bump.
You Can Pick Your Nose, Certainly, But You Can't Really Pick Your Friends (Or Their Noses)
The four survivors are portrayed (mostly) as real people. Flawed, even sometimes unlikable, but generally real people. That is to say, Purna is a cranky, extremely-reluctantly-heroic and generally bitchy outcast; Logan is a self-serving asshole who would just as soon abandon the other survivors of the island to their unpleasant fates; Xian is optimistic and determined to do the right thing by the other survivors and save as many lives as she can (kind of an odd attitude, really, for a super-spy/assassin); and Sam B. is basically the normal guy - however, he strongly sympathizes with the plight of the poor and unprepared people of Banoi which, if Moresby is any indication, is largely one gigantic jungle with a ghetto in one area and a luxurious resort on the coast. Sam would rather help the people than abandon them, while Logan only goes along with plans to save them because Sam B. is huge and they'd leave his ass there if he didn't, and Purna has to be cajoled into doing the right thing.
If they really grow as characters, that's not really indicated thus far. Much like the survivors of Left 4 Dead, they are generally depicted as being reluctantly banded together in the face of apocalypse, considering themselves to be (as Sam puts it) a “crew” who stand by one another. In a scene where it is heavily implied that supporting character Jin is sexually assaulted by “raskols” who have seized control of the police station (and the survivors have stormed the police station, killing any punk in the way, to get her back) Sam reacts with anger that she put herself and the survivors in harm's way, while Purna and Xian herd he and Logan out of the room to console the victim. It's not a pleasant scene, and only the knowledge that I had already rather messily put every “raskol” in the building to the sword (well, electrical machete, anyway) kept me from suggesting that we make Killing Punks our new hobby in the game. From that scene, Jin, who was previously determined to help everyone on the island no matter what, reacts generally with apathy to any plans but sticks with the crew as they forge their way inland.
I haven't really played through the entire plot yet, though, so maybe I'll come back and revisit that aspect of the game.
A Brief Look At Glitches
There are some good ones. From control inputs that don't respond from time to time, to attacks “phasing” harmlessly through targets, to special undead (in this case, a Suicider and a Thug in two specific locations) that don't react to your presence at all, to weapons de-spawning on the ground within seconds of being dropped by a monster, to an occasional bizarre clipping issue and quests refusing to load (leaving NPCs standing around doing nothing, doors that don't open, etc), this game has a handful of goofy-assed glitches that speak pretty strongly to the fact that the option to download patches to consoles has really spoiled developers, but at least they are things that console gamers can fix, unlike in the old days. I'm not 100% positive that the “revive a fallen teammate” function is glitched out, but I've only seen it work once.
However, there is one bizarre glitch that urgently needs repair.
You see, in Dead Island, sometimes doors and beach balls can prove lethal! That's right, kicking the wrong beach ball can instantly kill you (and there's no predicting when doing so will result in your demise). I've done it personally, to my shock and annoyance. Also, when ramming open stuck doors, occasionally shutting the door after yourself will cause the door to close on you with fatal results. Yeah. And since dying costs you money, you'll want to avoid that sort of fucked up instant death error.
In Conclusion, You Know, Finally
So how do I really feel about the game? I think Dead Island is worth playing; it's flawed, yes, and it needs that promised patch to come out, but it's still way better than Dead Rising (uuuugh) and its sequel, and is a damn good time when you can play with friends.
Forget You Ever Saw Me,
MY JUJU AIN'T NOTHIN' TO FUCK WIT'!
So here's the deal: I am conflicted about this game. Yes, I like it on some levels (the levels that horrific violence appeal to, generally) and I am fully willing to accept that by playing the game solo, I'm missing out on some things. I can get behind that.
On the other hand, this game does some things that make me want to punch the designers.
So what's the verdict - and why?
No Obvious Exits From An Island
Let's start with a synopsis of the plot. Banoi (BAH-nu-EE) is an island off the coast of Papua New Guinea, which is basically the Casablanca of Oceania: people come to Banoi to forget, to start their lives over, be a tourist or else just to get fucked up ninety ways to Sunday and let it all hang out. So a collection of misfits (okay, three misfits and an Alleged Concierge) happen to gather at the Royal Palms Resort one slamming weekend. And then all fucking hell comes loose. And tries to eat you.
Short story short, you wake up with your clothes all jacked up (no explanation for why Xian Mei's uniform is tore up or why exactly Purna wore combat boots, knives and a police pistol belt to the opening cinematic dance party) and in a hotel full of zombies. Everything has gone to a cannibalistic apocalypse in a hand basket, and no explanation is given for how you were able to doze peacefully through the entire island infrastructure imploding under the assault of hordes of undead. When you see the extent of the destruction, you will assume you were either out for a damned long time (which does not jive with events following your awakening) or else time is passing at a ridiculous rate (which is somewhat borne out by NPC statements about food you just fucking delivered). Turns out you're immune, and that means that you are now an entire population of survivors' favorite team of errand runners. Take that, superior immune system.
Dead Island gives you four characters to choose from: scrappy half-Aborigine vaguely-man-hating ex-cop turned bodyguard Purna; washed up pro football star, human trainwreck and mild-to-moderate douchebag Logan; fading one hit wonder, top-hat enthusiast and rapper Sam B; and mild-mannered Chinese concierge (spoiler: super-spy) Xian Mei. Purna is skilled with guns and serves as the 'leader,' providing buffs to her party of survivors; Logan is the jack of all trades, has a good arm and throws stuff; Sam B is the Resident Big Black Man who has a knack for blunt instruments (not guns though, shockingly enough) and Xian Mei, being Chinese, knows kung fu, obviously. (Okay, fine, she's a super-spy assassin or whatever. If you don't have the preview comic to tell you that, you just assume that she is a concierge who was previously a cop who is handy with a shiv and knows kung fu. Due to being Chinese.)
The game is designed around a multiplayer mechanic: While all characters are good at slaughtering the approximately 8,000,000 undead on this fucking little island, each brings a specialty to your crew that is hard to do without. Sam B is the tank, able to absorb more punishment than the other characters; Xian Mei is a glass cannon whose skill with blades can leave zombies in bloody meat-chunks all over the landscape in seconds; Logan has stand-off ability with his thrown weapons talents, can get minor bonuses with all weapon types, and can spec to get stat bonuses from being drunk off his ass; and Purna's rage-fueled leadership bolsters the crew's abilities. She's also hot shit with a pistol which will eventually become much more useful. Also she gets an ability that gives her damage bonuses against male opponents. It tactfully describes the “Sex War” ability as giving an advantage against “opponents of the opposite sex” but I don't recall there being an option to play a male Purna, so this is somewhat pointless semantics.
This game is not meant to be soloed. If you're going to solo it and you want to avoid some frustration (more on that in a second) then you want to be Sam B. With health regeneration and increasing toughness to injury, the RBBM can better survive the brutal, unrelenting asskicking you're about to experience.
Now, to fight back against the hordes of undead assholes out to peel off your face and wear it as a cute little hat, you have basically any vaguely weapon-shaped piece of whatever you can find at your disposal, from diving knives to boat paddles to baseball bats (very popular on an island with no fucking baseball diamond anywhere, actually) to whatever depraved nonsense you cobble together with scavenged parts, from electrified blades to stunning axes to poisoned machetes to a baseball bat with a circular saw built in. While these “augmented” weapons are actually kind of worthless (more on that in the next section) they are pretty entertaining. Oh, and maintaining a long tradition of “really should have thought that through better,” the game happily gives me occasional opportunity to set shit on fire. In fact, the molotovs, incendiary grenades and propane tanks they provide are spectacular ways to kill roughly a city block of zombified shitheads in a colossal foon-ball. Weapons come in grades with cute little names the meaning of which I truly have not tried to figure out yet, in classic RPG fashion (as of MMOs anyway) and with level requirements (“Can't... swing... axe... must... get more buff... from... killing zombies and doing chores... hnnnn...”) and varying degrees of usefulness. Some characters get special bonuses for using certain weapons based on a character affinity for their use, and your abilities with them can be modified with the various Combat, Fury and Survival abilities that you can specialize in as you level.
So where is the drawback to this weapon-based mayhem? Oh, right...
It. All. Fucking. Breaks.
Zen and the Art of Machete Maintenance
There will come a point where you realize that you are spending a lot of money in this game keeping your favorite machete polished and the nails unbent on your preferred spiked baseball bat. I have literally pissed thousands of in-game dollars up the wall on weapon repairs. You want to bitch about the stupid deteriorating weapon mechanics in Fallout 3/FONV or Elder Scrolls? You don't know shit. These goddamn weapons drop tens of percents of condition every time you shank a single opponent. You stroll out of a safe zone with your zombie-cleaving razor-edged machete, get into one brawl with four Walkers, and your blade drops to 80% condition with a bent tip, chipped blade, and some very fucked up looking red goo all over the mangled edge. While curb-stomping your foes with your almighty kick attack saves on weapon condition (or even better, the stomp attack), by level 15 it was taking me a full minute to kick just one downed zombie to death. You essentially have to focus on taking them out as fast as possible: slice off a head or arm as quickly as you can, because the more you whale on the undead the faster (and I mean that it is fucking fast) your weapons will creep towards oblivion.
This, by the way, happens constantly even with special abilities that reduces the wear and tear on weapons by tens of percents, fully maxed out.
I hate weapon deterioration. It's a stupid concept that never gets portrayed in a way that is in the slightest bit believable. How, exactly, does one wear out a fucking crowbar bludgeoning slightly-rotted humans with it? It's made of steel. It is made of one piece of steel, in fact. Have you ever, even once in your life, ever managed to bend a crowbar out of shape? I bet you haven't because they are not meant to bend. Chopping things that are softer than wood with an axe does not make the goddamn handle disintegrate within a matter of minutes. How about brass knuckles? They're made of one piece of metal. About two inches worth of material ever actually makes contact with your target. How do you beat a pair of brass knuckles to shit like that by punching zombies in the yob? You don't.
Incidentally, firearms, weapons which do in fact require pretty constant maintenance, never wear out. Figure that fucker out, if you can.
Weapon modification fucks your gear up even more. The game helpfully provides you with an arsenal of insane things you can learn to do to your gear, from sticking nails into a baseball bat to fitting your favorite machete with a device that electrocutes as it slices (The critical hit from such a weapon sends a zombie into spastic convulsions covered with arcing electricity. I call it “the Crit Dance.”) to wrapping a baton in fuel-soaked bandages and setting it ablaze to the Special Edition only mod, the Ripper. The Ripper turns a normal baseball bat into an abnormal battery-powered circular saw mounted on a weighted haft. It's demented and weird.
However, nearly every modification you make will reduce the durability of a weapon (after all you are sticking nails in things, attaching makeshift power tools to bats, etc) which means they wear out even faster. You have pay to upgrade weapons (which makes them stronger and less busted-ass looking) and to repair them and to modify them and to repair them again after you modify them (yes, it damages them to modify them) so you end up spending thousands on each weapon. The better the quality of your gear, the more money it costs to repair them. Spend too long roaming the streets and you'll come home with nigh-destroyed equipment and a wallet that is begging your forgiveness.
This becomes something of an issue when you arrive in the City of Moresby...
Welcome to Moresby, You Tasty Chump
The resort where the game starts out is a shockingly beautiful place, with post card vistas of white sand and blue ocean. Banoi is in Oceania as I mentioned, and Oceania is a goddamn gorgeous place. Being a resort, it has a sexy hotel with sexy architecture, secluded bungalows, gallons of blood everywhere, and a few thousand psychotic sons of bitches that want to eat your flesh. More on them in a moment.
Then you modify a bank truck (yes, one of those big armored things you associate with Brinks) into The Misery Wagon, an armored brute of a vehicle capable of bursting through hordes of zombies and debris-clogged tunnels and set out for the City of Moresby inland to look for supplies.
And you roll that big ass truck right into the motherfucking hellish offspring of Baghdad, Mogadishu, Monrovia, the entire Green Zone and Land of the Dead. Moresby is what you'd expect a ghetto overrun with zombies to look like. Cramped, narrow streets littered with wrecked cars, burning dumpsters and makeshift barricades erected by desperate survivors; barriers set up by the Australian version of the CDC, a tent clinic full of bastard undead; and roving packs of psychotics with guns (which I will also address momentarily). You find a church under siege by the undead, roll up your sleeves and prepare to get your ass stomped.
Oh yes, it will be stomped.
In the resort there are a few hundred zombies here there and everywhere. You rarely encounter extremely large packs of the undead and you can generally guess about where they'll be before they attack. You find scattered individuals and every once in a while a pack (usually on a quest or hassling a barricaded survivor).
In Moresby there are more zombies on every street than there are in the entire resort, I think. You can't walk ten feet in Moresby without tripping over a pack of man-eating assholes. They are literally everywhere, all the time. The minute you step out of a safe zone (I've found three so far) you will be up to your nipples in blood. Solo, I spend most of my time sprinting from location to location to complete the various quests in the area. With another player, I have to wade through the undead, killing as I go, because other people do not seem to understand the urgency of getting the fuck out of Dodge before Dodge fucks you raw.
Moresby is terrible. The quests are all rated Hard or Very Hard, except for a couple random ones rated Medium... which brings us to...
Your Quest Difficulty Sits On A Throne of Lies
… some bullshit. Some. Bullshit.
Some asshole rated some of the quests in Moresby as being of “Medium” difficulty. That is a blatant lie. They take place in the same hellish ghetto with the same unending stream of motherfuckers out to eat you. In fact one of the quests rated “Medium” takes you to the clinic. I have no idea what is actually in the clinic. It doesn't matter. What the clinic is, is bullshit. It is a never-ending assembly line of pain. Essentially an infinite number of “Infected” type enemies spawn there. Infected have a homing sense. They know where you are and will come to you. They are terrible.
The quest difficulties and attached experience point values are silly as hell in this game. You can never be sure what exactly you're going to get. Some easy quests are just that: really easy. And usually the quests marked “Hard” are understating it a little. But in Moresby, the quests are fucking liars. Tedious liars that require you to trudge through miles and miles of hellish streets for no other reason than their own sick amusement. Even fast traveling (and bless the pointy head of whatever genius gave you that option) doesn't really relieve you from the burden of the very chore-like quests in this section of the game.
The Science of the Cheap Shot and the Art of Vicious Dismemberment: Combat and the Enemies of Dead Island
The undead in Dead Island are divided into classes of critter. The most common are the Walkers, who are your basic flesh-eating undead Romero zombie. They stagger about, vaguely aware of your presence, and can speed up to a shambling trot when they're excited. They like to punch you in the face, but some are tool users and carry weapons. These can do an amazing amount of damage in a hurry. Oh, and sometimes they get an idea of sorts in their rotten brains and throw their weapons at you, so that's fun too.
The worst part about Walkers is their lunge attack. This forces you to grapple with the undead, bashing the trigger buttons until you cold-cock it in the mouth and get it off of you. Overall the Walkers aren't hard to kill and are satisfying to slash, burn, electrocute and curb-stomp messily, but like every undead in the game, you cannot reliably interrupt their attacks even if you use your stunning kick move or manage to land an instant death blow by decapitating the zombie, or even if you cut off or break the arm that was going for you. Zombies can always interrupt your attacks, including your kick on occasion. Essentially most of the damage you take in Dead Island will come from cheap attacks you can't prevent from connecting. I've developed a tendency to swat zombies then jump back from them to make sure they don't connect.
Less common (until you reach the hell that is Moresby) are the Infected. If Walkers are classic Romero zombies, then Infected are the new Romero zombie: running, climbing, screeching assholes. Why these are called that I am unsure of, since I assume that this is the standard issue plague-based undead epidemic - it's spread through bites - so why some are Walkers and some are Infected, I do not know. The Walkers do seem to be more mangled than the Infected, generally speaking. Infected can't take a lot of damage; one or two good hits will generally shut one down. What they do well, however, is come screaming out of nowhere (they scream, you see, continuously, it's very annoying) and beat the shit out of you. The Infected attack by windmilling their arms as they run, and since you can't interrupt a zombie's attack, if you don't stop it with a perfectly timed decapitation or kick in the face, the Infected will land an unstoppable barrage of hits on your head. They are, bar none, the most annoying enemies in the game. The clinic in Moresby and everywhere near it are especially fun because of the unending stream of Infected that spawn from basically thin air and come sprinting at you to beat your ass.
The Thug is the first “tank” monster you fight. Basically the Thug is a huge black guy whose powerful physique has resulted in a sort of Super-Walker, about seven feet tall. He doesn't run and doesn't even do the fast lunge of the lesser Walker. Instead, what the Thug has is the ability to send you flying through the air with most of your life gone with a single swat. He typically roars and flails, swinging his arms at random. They're not really that hard to kill; keep your distance when he is flipping out, then close and try to disable his limbs before jumping back to avoid the counterattack. With two players, one can keep his attention while the other blithely rips him to pieces from the other direction.
Then we have the Suicider. You can tell that one is around by the constant “Ooooohhhhh... YEAAAAAAHHHH” noise that it makes (no really that's what it sounds like). They walk at a very slow, but relentless pace: a shambling, bloated mass of pulsating tumors that are probably tied for most disgusting thing in a game where I regularly turn skulls into hollow, vaguely-skull-like bloody wrecks. When a Suicider gets close enough or takes sufficient damage, it detonates, instantly dropping you to zero life. A well timed Suicider kill at a safe distance can destroy a pack of Walkers, though, so they are not without their uses. They will follow you any distance you care to go, but are easily evaded before the game sticks your ass in a seemingly endless series of sewers to travel to the Wealthy District of Moresby (which you see very little of since you're constantly in the sewers or in buildings).
Next up is the Ram. The Ram is an asshole. Basically somebody strapped a very, very big man into a combination straight jacket and bomb disposal armor, gave him giant steel-plated boots and a “Hannibal mask” and then he became a zombie. Why someone would do this, I do not know at this time. The Ram fights by charging at things and bowling them over, like the Charger from Left 4 Dead 2. The Ram needs about 6 inches to build up enough steam to send you flying through the air, and he does a horrible amount of damage. If you close with him before he is ready to charge, he generally just cranks back and gives you Das Boot and sends you skipping down Lollipop Lane with no teeth in your head. The Ram is only vulnerable from the back, which is handy if you happen to be playing Xian, who gets special abilities to do more damage from behind an enemy. She can quickly put down a Ram (so long as her weapon is in good condition) making him annoying (extremely annoying) but not actually as dangerous as the fucking Infected, who make me want to quit playing sometimes.
Tied with the Suicider for most vile thing you will see regularly in Dead Island is the Floater. Fortunately you don't see them too often. Basically, a Floater is a bloated corpse with a hollowed back (it's pretty gross) and translucent skin showing off internal organs (it's really gross) that pukes at you (it's really, really gross). Floater puke is flammable and they tend to spew at random, so you can find something to set zombies on fire with and ignite everything the fat bastard yarfed on. Basically the Floater is a non-zombie-attracting rip-off of the Boomer of Left 4 Dead, except they gave the detonating properties of the Boomer to the Suicider instead. Whee.
Lastly we have the Butcher. The zombie with kung fu. Essentially some asshole cut off a zombie's hands and sharpened the bones of the arm into blades, taught them kung fu, and sent them to the jungle to annoy the shit out of you. I've only manhandled one so far, and it wasn't terrible. I suspect this will get worse later when there are multiple of them. The Butcher sprints like an Infected, probably hits pretty hard what with the bone spikes, and likes to duck your head shots. This is annoying of him.
There are also human enemies, who generally have guns (nearly all of them have guns) and who are extremely annoying, generally shooting the shit out of you the first time you encounter them and occasionally turning Dead Island into a mediocre shooter. Generally the easiest way to handle humans is to shoot them in the head: they can take a shocking number of bullets to the body, so generally just obey the maxim of “Lead In The Head Makes It Dead.” It doesn't always work on the undead but it generally drops humans in their own shadow. Thunk.
However, as bothersome as the enemies and their cheap shots are, you do get some cool tricks to fight back with. Each character has three “trees” they can spend points into as they level: Combat, Survival and Fury. Fury provides the character with the ability to enter a sort of berserk state, gaining special advantages and attacks. Purna pulls out a gun and starts blazing away, providing buffs to the party as she does; Sam B puts on his brass knuckles and proceeds to slam zombies with haymaker punches that are (generally) instantly fatal; Xian goes on a super-fast knife-wielding rampage; and Logan takes out a supply of blades and hurls them at all enemies in view to deadly effect. Fury is generally a great way to handle things when the chips are down though it has the poor taste to be triggered by holding the same button that triggers a health kit so it doesn't always go off when you want it to. The Fury tree also gives easier ways to generate the “rage” that fuels the Fury mode (Purna can generate Fury by booting zombies around), improves Fury abilities (like extending duration and improving damage as a general one) in both general ways and ones unique to each character. Xian has abilities to increase her health and speed in Fury; Logan has one to extend the range of his thrown knives.
The Combat tree gives each character improved damage with their preferred weapons and even special moves such as Xian's wuxia-inspired leap attack and backstab (combined they do a ridiculous amount of damage) and the Stomp Move, which allows you to stomp the shit out of a downed opponent's head, killing them instantly. Sam and Xian favor one specific weapon type, whereas Purna is skilled to some extent with all weapons and especially with blades, and Logan can become skilled with to a lesser extent with all weapons, but especially one handed ones.
Survival provides each character with useful abilities like scrounging better stuff, taking less damage in combat, finding more money and the like. Combined the trees give you a good way to customize your own survivor and influences the group dynamic in combat. For example, when specializing the character Sam B., I focused on the Combat tree, and took an ability that gives Sam a punishing shoulder tackle move whenever he's running (which flings enemies aside on impact), whereas another player focused his more on general combat and survival techniques. This is definitely one of the best aspects of the game.
For the most part, combat against the undead is deeply satisfying when you are playing with friends. Alone it's a pain in the ass, especially in the city section of the game, but with a friend you can have a blast slicing off limbs, crushing skulls, and watching your elemental effects from toxic, poisonous, incendiary or electric weapons take hold on even hordes of hapless undead, leaving destruction in your wake. Cheap shots are annoying but fighting with the right mix of aggression and caution can minimize even that. I don't like the Infected and would happily see them gone from the game, but they are a small road bump.
You Can Pick Your Nose, Certainly, But You Can't Really Pick Your Friends (Or Their Noses)
The four survivors are portrayed (mostly) as real people. Flawed, even sometimes unlikable, but generally real people. That is to say, Purna is a cranky, extremely-reluctantly-heroic and generally bitchy outcast; Logan is a self-serving asshole who would just as soon abandon the other survivors of the island to their unpleasant fates; Xian is optimistic and determined to do the right thing by the other survivors and save as many lives as she can (kind of an odd attitude, really, for a super-spy/assassin); and Sam B. is basically the normal guy - however, he strongly sympathizes with the plight of the poor and unprepared people of Banoi which, if Moresby is any indication, is largely one gigantic jungle with a ghetto in one area and a luxurious resort on the coast. Sam would rather help the people than abandon them, while Logan only goes along with plans to save them because Sam B. is huge and they'd leave his ass there if he didn't, and Purna has to be cajoled into doing the right thing.
If they really grow as characters, that's not really indicated thus far. Much like the survivors of Left 4 Dead, they are generally depicted as being reluctantly banded together in the face of apocalypse, considering themselves to be (as Sam puts it) a “crew” who stand by one another. In a scene where it is heavily implied that supporting character Jin is sexually assaulted by “raskols” who have seized control of the police station (and the survivors have stormed the police station, killing any punk in the way, to get her back) Sam reacts with anger that she put herself and the survivors in harm's way, while Purna and Xian herd he and Logan out of the room to console the victim. It's not a pleasant scene, and only the knowledge that I had already rather messily put every “raskol” in the building to the sword (well, electrical machete, anyway) kept me from suggesting that we make Killing Punks our new hobby in the game. From that scene, Jin, who was previously determined to help everyone on the island no matter what, reacts generally with apathy to any plans but sticks with the crew as they forge their way inland.
I haven't really played through the entire plot yet, though, so maybe I'll come back and revisit that aspect of the game.
A Brief Look At Glitches
There are some good ones. From control inputs that don't respond from time to time, to attacks “phasing” harmlessly through targets, to special undead (in this case, a Suicider and a Thug in two specific locations) that don't react to your presence at all, to weapons de-spawning on the ground within seconds of being dropped by a monster, to an occasional bizarre clipping issue and quests refusing to load (leaving NPCs standing around doing nothing, doors that don't open, etc), this game has a handful of goofy-assed glitches that speak pretty strongly to the fact that the option to download patches to consoles has really spoiled developers, but at least they are things that console gamers can fix, unlike in the old days. I'm not 100% positive that the “revive a fallen teammate” function is glitched out, but I've only seen it work once.
However, there is one bizarre glitch that urgently needs repair.
You see, in Dead Island, sometimes doors and beach balls can prove lethal! That's right, kicking the wrong beach ball can instantly kill you (and there's no predicting when doing so will result in your demise). I've done it personally, to my shock and annoyance. Also, when ramming open stuck doors, occasionally shutting the door after yourself will cause the door to close on you with fatal results. Yeah. And since dying costs you money, you'll want to avoid that sort of fucked up instant death error.
In Conclusion, You Know, Finally
So how do I really feel about the game? I think Dead Island is worth playing; it's flawed, yes, and it needs that promised patch to come out, but it's still way better than Dead Rising (uuuugh) and its sequel, and is a damn good time when you can play with friends.
Forget You Ever Saw Me,
MY JUJU AIN'T NOTHIN' TO FUCK WIT'!