Dead Island Impression

 It seems that all it took was the trailer for the zombie game, Dead Island, to stir everyone up with excitement.

When a friend sent me a link of a "freaking awesome" brutal, zombie-killing video game, my initial reaction was, let's just say, not positive. I think if you've seen one zombie game, you've seen them all. Kill zombies. Go somewhere else to kill more zombies. Repeat. What fun.

But then I saw the trailer. Wow, was I amazed. There was actually EMOTION in there. The PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC game’s introduction featured a beautifully compiled, reverse-chronological look at a family on vacation being attacked by zombies. You actually feel compassion for the little girl in there, and the rest of the family, a huge quality that almost all other games seem to lack. 'The music is somber, the visuals utterly harrowing, making the oversaturated zombie genre seem appealing again,' says a previous post of Game Life.

Word instantly spread through every kind of social media. Everyone was talking about the gorgeous, well-edited, emotionally engaging game, but no one knew what the game itself looked like.

At Game Developers Conference, Game Life got a 45 minute demo. Here's the outline of what they saw.


The game features four characters to choose from, each with different attributes and playing styles, and you can play through the game multiple times as each one for a slightly different experience. There will also be drop-in and drop-out multiplayer, so the co-op experience will be a big draw for the game. The player we saw in our demo was a one-hit wonder rapper who said things like “damn,” often, and would remark on kills using plenty of four-letter words. Oh, stereotypical African-American characters … will gaming ever grow tired of you?

Dead Island takes place on a tropical island, but the environments will include a jungle, a city, interiors, exteriors and everything in between. The developers promise a wide variety of environments to fight through, and you’ll be killing zombies with a variety of hand-to-hand weapons and even some firearms. The game is played in the first person, and the battles against the undead will be close, intimate affairs.

The actual combat looks strong. They saw the character break the left arm of one zombie only to be clobbered by the right. The interactions between the characters are a little stilted, and the voice acting isn’t as strong as they would like. Still, the game has it where it counts: It’s a tense, often brutal game, although they saw precious little of the emotion and tone of the trailer that caused everyone to fall in love with it.

There will be vehicle missions, a black market and the ability to mix and match objects to create new weapons. You’ll just need to find items to combine, blueprints, workbenches and … where have we heard this before? That prompted me to ask if the developers are worried about being compared to Capcom’s recent zombie game Dead Rising 2.

“No, because we’re never going for the funny stuff. We’re doing weapons that make sense, and upgrading what you have,” they told me. “You can sharpen a machete as you saw, or you can attach a battery and make it a stun gun of sorts.” They’re not taping a paddle to a chainsaw, they pointed out. But is making a stun gun with a knife and a battery that much different?

There are slow zombies, there are fast zombies and there are zombies that look like they were infected by the Flood and explode when shot. Fun stuff. Killing the zombies in innovative ways will get you experience points, and you’ll use those points to level up and create a zombie-killing machine no matter what character you play as. Your friends can jump in and out of your game at will to help you survive.


The setting is goofy, the voice acting is subpar and many of the concepts seem to have been borrowed from past games, but it all looks good. Certainly goofier than we were hoping for based on the trailer, but I went into the appointment excited about Dead Island, and left wanting to get my hands on it and play some more. That’s a win, no matter how you cut it. It comprises less of emotion but offers more of an overall fun, ultra-violent look at the possibility of zombies taking over paradise. I think the axe-throwing of the developers will be enough to grab everyone's attention.


Dead Island is coming to the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC, and will feature between 20 and 30 hours of open-world, zombie-killing fun. The voice acting may be a little rough, but as long as the core action is this good, it’s easy to overlook.


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