At Ground Zero on Dead Island

My first brush with Dead Island was probably the way most gamers first saw it through the intensely gripping and heart wrenching trailer which seemed to carve into my soul. Never had a game trailer made me cry before Dead Island. It seemed that Dead Island was going to be a bit more than the your run of the mill zombie survival game but I wasn't going to hold my breath.

There are plenty of games out there within the zombie genre that always seemed to fall short of making me feel like an actual survivor of a zombie apocalypse. Left4Dead came close but, after a while, the horde of zombies coming begins to feel incredibly predictable and loses its fear factor. Not to mention that it's highly unlikely that one would find stockpiles of infinite ammo and guns just randomly laid about in a real zombie apocalypse. Left4Dead 2 fell even more short. In Dead Rising, it was all about the scavenging while skirting through mass numbers of frequently slow to respond mass zombies. It's hard to be afraid of something that moves at a snail pace and you can see from the start. You know what you're getting into when you start moving through a crowd of zombies. You've already steeled yourself to move. Dead Island, however, is different. It's chilling.

After the now familiar opening cutscene, you find yourself alone in a darkened hotel with peculiar sounds all around you during the tutorial. Immediately, you have a sense that you are very much alone and you are. The tutorial, like so many games, is single player only. Survive those few minutes and you will be rewarded with the company and solace of your friends. The game has an excellent built in constant VOIP. Normally, the lack of "push to talk" would be pretty irritating but, unless you have a friend with an ill configured mic, the uncensored vocals of your teammates can dramatically add to the mood of the game whether it be the hilarity of you and 3 of your friends collectively channelling their inner street thug to curb stomp a zombie or hearing a teammate get startled into a unabashed yelp of fear by something in the game.

Dead Island is creepy as hell. One would never imagine that a beautiful tropical island resort with its sunny skies could be creepy but it is. Dead Island does zombie survivor horror very well. Everyone knows that the best way to overcome a fear is to face it. This is the flaw with Left4Dead, its sequel, Killing Floor, and Dead Rising. You walk out, see the mass hordes of zombies and face your fears before venturing out. In Dead Island, the zombies are not generally out in the open except for in pockets on the road. Most of the time, you don't even see any right off the bat. After 36 hours as the Xian character, I've learned to chop off a leg of every dead body I see because you never know when one of them is going to rise up silently behind you and it doesn't take long to fall to zombies on Dead Island either. The resort may initially be good times for all but by once you reach the city, the game is just scary.

One of the common complaints about Dead Island is the lack of story driven plot. I find this humorous because the characters that we are all playing are zombie apocalypse survivors. We're not supposed to know what is going on and this adds a definite element to the game. Again, the built in VOIP adds to this effect by allowing players to freely comment on whatever story progression occurs. As we're listening to the fellow promising salvation to us on the radio, each one of us ends up discussing whether we even trust the guy. If the same thing were happening in reality, we would be most likely having that same discussion. When there are cut scenes involving our characters, I sometimes almost wish they weren't happening. Playing in first person allows a player to 'become" the character that they have chosen to play. A cutscene where one's character is behaving in a manner that we would find discordant with how we would personally respond tends to lessen the immersive experience. Thankfully, the cut scenes in Dead Island are infrequent, allowing the players to develop their own personalities for their chosen character through the constant interaction of players via VOIP.

Dead Island isn't perfect. In fact, there has been a couple bugs that Mike and I have experienced that would have normally caused us to stop playing the game entirely until a fix was released. For both of us, obscene crackling kept popping up throughout the introductory movie and persisted when actual game play began. Both Mike and I have Logitech headsets, which could be part of the issue, and turning off the Dolby 7.1 seemed to correct a great deal of the crackle issue. Normally, a sound issue like that would deter me from playing. I am autistic and that makes me pretty sensitive to noises like loud crackling. I experienced a similar problem with Serious Sam HD and it actually kept me from playing the game until they came up with a fix. Not so with Dead Island, I was involved enough to grit my teeth and wince during crackles simply to keep on playing.

The other normally fatal bug was when Mike's computer blue screened and the save file for his lvl 34 Sam B was irreparably corrupted. Normally, this would have been an instant kiss of death for the game. Putting over 36 hours into a game only to have all one's work into a character destroyed is pretty irritating. Both he and I have had that happen with games in the past and we simply stopped playing them out of spite. Again, not so with Dead Island. The game is simply that good. Dead Island does allow a player to create a character of a suitable level for whatever chapter they are on so the pain of this happening is somewhat lessoned but it's still rather harsh to lose all of one's work, especially the weapons and access to the various weapon mods.

There is, however, a significant glitch in Dead Island that can be used to help restore one's lost weapons. One can copy weapons by throwing them at the same time as dropping it. This creates an exact duplicate of the weapons, which can then be stored in a friend's Jin storage. This way, should the unthinkable happen, those awesome weapons that you found and modded can still be yours regardless of a corrupted save file. Hopefully, Techland fixes the issue with corrupted save files before they correct the weapon duplication bug. Be nice, Techland!!

If you're looking for a good zombie survival game that puts you at ground zero of a zombie apocalypse than Dead Island is your game. You're not going to find infinite guns and ammunition here. You're not going to create preposterous weaponry like the drill bucket in Dead Rising 2. You're going to be scavenging for food, drink, weapons, and ammunitions just to simply survive. You're going to be scared and that's just as it should be.