Dead Island, the game of my childhood, I remember playing it back in 2010, back in the times where I considered myself to be rich with 10$ in my pocket. I remember saving up money with my brother for this game, we bought it, I enjoyed it, my brother considered it to be trash, but he’s an imbecile with a bad taste in video games - so ignore him!

But some points that my brother made were correct, and this is what I’ll be doing for today - I’ll fairly criticize this game, bring out its pros and cons, and bring out my favorite aspects of this game. I’ll be judging Dead Island by the following:

• Story
• Gameplay
• Combat
• Quest/Mission System
• Graphics
• Developer
• Price

So, now that the intro is over, let’s get to it!

Story:

Jehovah Witnesses?

You wake up from a horrible hangover in an empty room, in a seemingly empty hotel - you wander through unsettling corridors with abandoned luggage laying everywhere, but things go from mysterious to bad when you witness an infected woman falling from a hotel balcony - long story short, you soil your pants and try to escape the hotel, get your head bashed in by some zombie, wake up in some crappy beach house and slaughter zombies for the rest of the game. Nuff said!

The story of this game is like the story of any other zombie game, evil zombies run around wishing to eat your brain, you cut through hundreds of zombies to escape Banoi Island. IT’S MEH, but the gore makes up for it!

Gameplay:

Beating the crap out of a zombie with an oar.

1 thing that made me sad about this game was the lack of character creation, it only allows you to select 4 premade characters. My favorite one was Sam B, he’s the badass rapper with a hammer breaking limbs and crushing skulls! 

Each character specializes in different things, for example:

• Xian Mei - cutting damage
• Sam B - blunt damage
• Purna Jackson - firearms, rifle, etc
• John Morgan - throws knives at zombies, cuz why not

In Dead Island, you can cut off limbs of other zombies(or just break them), cause critical damage that will knock over the infected, run them over with cars, use propane tanks as explosives against groups of zombies, and plenty other things.

You also get perk trees:

This is pretty self-explanatory, the “FURY” tree perk focuses on upgrading your special power, the “COMBAT” one unlocks abilities that allow you to kill zombies more efficiently, finish off zombies that are laying on the ground, etc. And finally, the third perk named “Survival” focuses on perks such as Picklock, which allows you to open metal chests that can contain rare-quality weaponry.

The map of Dead Island is pretty massive and diverse, throughout your playthrough you’ll be going through the tourist area, a jungle, a city, and many more awesome locations - it’s even cooler that you can drive a vehicle and explore while smashing into zombies! The AI in this game though, god it’s trash… You’ll get the first glimpse of AI in this game when you’ll be saving some guy in a pick-up truck surrounded by zombies.

Combat:

Get rekt, zamwbie!

The combat system in Dead Island is pretty fun, you can use anything from a tiny knife to a shotgun. You can access the weapon menu by holding the MMB, the game also allows you to craft your weaponry at a crafting bench. 

In Dead Island, you get to cut off limbs, break limbs, shoot them, dismember zombies with explosives, run over other zombies, you can even kill armed gang members in the city. Oh and also, you can dodge enemy attacks via jumping off at the right time. 

Combat in Dead Island is awesome, I’ve had awesome nostalgia playing this game in 2021 and it never got boring to me - the replayability of this game is very high!

Mission System:

You get your own tab where you can see a list of your quests, the skulls represent the difficulty, you also get a short description of what you’re supposed to do under each mission.

The mission system is split both into quests for the main storyline and the side quests, the quality of some quests in this game are… average at best, like for example getting a bottle of champagne for some Russian chick. That was by far the worst quest in the world of video games…

Graphics:

A mix of hell and heaven!

When it comes to graphics, this game looks pretty decent for a 2016 game - the lighting, lens flare, textures of the zombie, and weapon models look pretty neat, generally, the world feels realistic and pretty(despite zombie corpses scattered everywhere). 

Does this game need a remaster? Well, this IS a remaster of the Dead island game that came out in 2011, and the graphics did a great leap in quality, thus no new remasters are needed for this game, in my opinion. 

Developers:

Dead Island(2011 version) was developed by Techland, released by Deep Silver. Techland is a Polish studio that first started working on Dead Island in 2008, releasing it 3 years later in 2011, 16th of February. It was released on the PC, PS3, and Xbox 360.

Is the game buggy? Yes, it’s pretty buggy, but not as buggy as I remember it being back in 2011, it was a bug fest. The game received plenty of patches, so it’s not that much of a problem anymore. 

The game is no longer being updated, probably because this game is like what, 10 years old? Christ, time moves fast ;(

Price:

This game costs around 17$ on Steam, it cost around 2.5$ in the summer sale, which is not around anymore. You can get it on PS4, Xbox 1, and PC. The last thing that’s worth adding is that this game doesn’t have any Pay To Win elements, maybe some DLC weapons, which are not even that OP, but that’s pretty much it.

FINAL VERDICT:

7/10

Pros:

• Awesome combat
• Crafting bench(you can craft your weaponry here)
• Beautiful graphics and an awesome world design
• Inclusion of vehicles
• Many enterable buildings

Cons:

• Awful storyline
• Bad character development
• Some cutscenes are pretty cringe
• The sewers… God, I hated that part!

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