Dead Island - First Impressions

Opinion from DrDaniel - Saturday, 17 September 2011 @ 6:14pm

I know I'm breaking the #1 Rule of reviewing but after completing Act One of Dead Island I remain underwhelmed.

Plot: Hedonism II gets zombified. No sign of Hedo Rick despite the rippin' and the tearin'.

Much like Hedo Rick the gameplay of Dead Island is embarrassingly awkward. For a game that has been largely touted for its melee combat the result is a limited range of attacks that are often hopelessly imprecise. It is disjointed, clumsy, disorienting, jarring, frustrating. After using the standard controls for a couple of hours I switched from digital to analog and this only slightly improved the gameplay.

Dead Island is uncertain about what it should be. It attempts to be like The Walking Dead with its emphasis on the plight and struggle of its characters yet it also wants to be like House of the Dead: Overkill with its simplistic exploitative gore.

At its best the zombie genre isn't about zombies but the affirmation of our common humanity while showing the savagery humans are capable of. Dead Island aspires towards these notions but falls well short. This is due in part to the poor voice acting and generic characters. Having characters crying in an infinite loop doesn't evoke sympathy, it just get annoying and unfortunately Dead Island doesn't allow friendly fire.

While setting the game on the island is appropriate for a sandbox the pineapple and banana-infused colour scheme fails to evoke any sense of foreboding. What is more the graphics are regularly glitchy, PS1 glitchy.

The most interesting - and telling - aspects of Dead Island is not the game itself but the issues surrounding the small piece of "zombie code" titled "FeministWhore". As Mark Sample from Play the Past writes:

The “leftover debug file” that contained the offending code in Dead Island was supposed to be inaccessible. Deleted. Dead and buried. And yet there it was, latent and waiting, and all it took was a bit of digging around on the part of some intrepid grave robber, and the fragment of code with the “FeministWhore” variable stirred, not exactly alive, but certainly not dead.

Moreover, as Tracey John succinctly and aptly writes "misogyny in code is still misogyny".

Had I not pre-ordered Dead Island, I certainly would have been less inclined to play this game.

I will pick up on more of these issues and more once I have have played the game through.