Haxmonster Finds Himself Shuffling Aimlessly As He Explores Dead Island
Posted by: Jason Silverain / Category: Guest, Video, Video games
I
find myself trapped on a beautiful island, haunted by a terrible
disease. Almost everyone has been infected and those that are, are
unaware of the fact that they have become monsters. The authorities
have sealed off the island to prevent the illness from spreading, for
a breakout would surely be the end of the world. Barricading doors
and windows offers no salvation, as the sheer size of the infestation
lets it break down any obstacle. The only ones unaffected are the
numerous zombies that roam the island. All others have been
contaminated with the horrible plague that is the Australian accent.
Be honest, I haven’t fallen victim to it as well, have I, mate?
Oh,
what fun it would be to actually play Dead Island if it had really
been about surviving the apocalypse of the bad accents.
Unfortunately, until that game really comes out, we’ll have to make
do with boring old zombie apocalypse and the game surely follows the
standard undead survival scenario with dedication. It’s a
four-player online co-operative game that, like a child trying to
build a few sandcastles at once, is spread out across multiple
sandboxes. The combat forms the core of the game and is mostly melee
focussed and very much stat-based, not unlike the vast majority of
MMORPG’s. The story keeps the cliché combo up by continuously
alternating between the most common end goals in a zombie scenario,
such as defending your home base, escaping the infected area or
inventing a cure. So, as you can tell, with the possible exception of
Left for Dead no zombie game is as formulaic as this one.
That
doesn’t take away that Dead Island is certainly quite fun and is
put together quite competently. Like in most zombie games most of
your time is spent looking at a standing corpse while either shooting
it or trying to smash it’s brains in and in this case we find a
clear preference for the latter. Luckily, I can report that cutting
through zombie flesh with big stodgy meat cleavers in this game is
pretty satisfying, akin to popping bubble wrap with a pneumatic
hammer. The fact that slicing a cleaver through an undead’s throat
has a punchy feel to it and creates an orgy of blood and severed
limbs might sound like an irrelevant detail, but I’ll say the same
thing as I said in my Symphony of the Night review: it is the thing
you will be doing for the vast majority of your playtime, so if
turning enemies into Swiss cheese comes with some visceral joy then
that, like the Swiss flag, is a big plus.
That said, not every weapon
is equally engaging to use. Machetes and knives pack a suitable
punch, but batons often seem to hit way harder than their size
suggests, which makes them feel like they have an invisible brick
taped to their end. Mallets are very awkward to use. They have a
thing in common with penises in that they are always a bit shorter
than their owner likes to think they are. This led to many situations
where I flung a sledgehammer a few centimetres before my target’s
face as if I only intended to smash his nose off to make an impromptu
Lord Voldemort replica. The game’s melee system also reminded me of
that of Ride to Hell: Retribution and when that name comes up, that’s
not a very good sign. The resemblance between the two games is that
the kick attack is extremely overpowered as it knocks enemies down,
can’t be interrupted, interrupts most enemy attacks and deals
damage as well. Since the time they require to get back up again is
usually enough to die of old age you won’t have problems
dispatching most hordes this way, which turns a lot of the game into
a ‘disabled kicking simulator’, which doesn’t pose a very meaty
challenge.
The
guns very clearly take a back seat, with no more than about five guns
in the entire game. Ammunition is very scarce, so you won’t be
shooting any other enemies than humans since they all use guns and
therefore drop bullets. This causes the situation where all
encounters with human enemies are firefights and all fights with the
undead are melee-focussed. It’s a shame that this separates both
combat styles. You can’t mow down zombies with your one or two guns
because of a lack of bullets and you can’t beat marauding survivors
to bits with a paddle because of an excess of bullets, in your guts
to be precise. On the other hand, the game offers you a choice of
four playable characters and this at least provides situations where
the gun-focussed character is at an advantage, which at least gives
the character system some use.
To
elaborate on the character system; the other three survivors
specialize in knives, blunt weapons and throwing weapons. As I
mentioned, blunt weapons are useless since you can’t estimate your
range and the throwing weapons expert has his issues as well. He
specializes in throwing regular melee weapons at the enemy and since
you can’t carry more than twelve weapons or so at a time you can’t
fend off more than half the walkers in an average horde. The other
half will then have ample opportunity to select the tastiest part of
your buttocks for consumption while you are busy looking at the floor
to collect all those weapons again. So essentially, your choice is
limited to guns or knives, with the deciding factor being whether you
want an edge in the first half of the game, when zombies are the
primary enemy, or if you want a lead in the second part, when there
are more guns lying around than in an average Texan shopping mall.
However, I played through the entire game with the gun specialist and
noticed no drawbacks when I broke out the fisticuffs, so it can all
be safely disregarded.
Beyond
their questionable gameplay differences an attempt was made to give
all four characters basic personalities, which are very evenly spread
out across the spectrum of selfishness. These identities are almost
solely conveyed through cutscenes which come across as a little weird
when you play the game on your own. After all, they always involve
all four characters even if they aren’t all present in gameplay. I
like that the leads clearly differ a bit from each other as far as
personality is concerned, but the problem remains that they influence
the story perhaps even less than I as a reviewer influence the course
of the gaming industry. Although a lot of events lead to bickering
between the two more selfish and the two less selfish characters,
they always decide to just go along with whatever other people
suggest. They never make a decision that alters the course of the
story.
Also,
their dialogues are more corny than the state of Iowa and entirely
one-dimensional. Mister blunt weapons specialist has a problem in
particular in that, in cutscenes, he always gestures as if he is
receiving electroshock-therapy even though he maintains the tone of
voice he could use to ask missus blunt weapons specialist to pass the
salt. But what ultimately kills characters for me in Dead Island,
beyond zombies I mean, is the horrible facial animation. Characters
could be shooting the walking corpse of a former loved one, could be
bleeding to death or could be sobbingly telling the story of a former
comrade who sacrificed himself for them, they always maintain this
dozy look in their eyes that suggests they are coming off
anaesthetics. This, combined with the corny, exaggerated Australian
accent, kills the game’s many attempts at making me feel sad for
the struggling and suffering of the robots pretending to be human
characters.
Dead Island: where the NPCs have less facial expressions than the zombies.
I’d
better warn you that some very light spoilers are around the bend.
Now that I’ve given it some thought, a lot of the story involves
the four leads being led around by the nose by a large variation of
secondary characters; a problem that also frustrated me in Grand
Theft Auto V. For instance, on one occasion the game shifts to an
entirely different mini-sandbox because of that one character who we
ask to transport us to the ultimate goal of the game says: ‘I can’t
take you there, but there’s this other place that’s totally not
where you want to go, shall we just pop over there?’ And even
without a reply from the protagonists that just happens then. At
another point in the game we spend four missions just to please one
other character so that he will let us through to our goal, but when
we are almost done with that we get a radio call from another
character, saying that we don’t need to help him and that there’s
another route to where we need to be, rendering the past hour of
gameplay pointless.
For
completeness’s sake I should probably elaborate on the fact that
Dead Island is an online co-op game. I only joined a four-player game
on one occasion and then I noticed that Dead Island shares a problem
with Trove in that there is a difference between playing with
someone
else and playing alongside
someone else. It doesn’t do the co-op much good that, like Trove,
Dead Island is in the latter category. Besides reviving each other and
exchanging items there is very little player-to-player interaction
which means that, most of the time, all four players are simply all
bashing heads in without interacting with each other. No characters or
abilities exist solely to buff other players or offer some kind of
supporting role. But as much as that damages the co-op experience, I
like that it works this way because it allows the game to stand up to
scrutiny when you play by yourself. You never really need others, so
this gives the game some versatility. It can be co-op if you want it
to be, but that doesn’t have to be the case.
Dead
Island was developed by a studio called ‘Techland’, but it’s
not quite an example of unparalleled technical prowess. Graphics-wise
it looks a bit like the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare games.
Everything looks like it’s shrink-wrapped in plastic and that there
are very little small details. Some textures, like those on the big
rocks that mark the end of the mini-sandboxes, are extremely blurry.
Furthermore, the game makes very temperamental use of invisible
walls. Often you can just shimmy your way through a lot of alleged
obstacles, but not everywhere and sometimes such a barrier seems
really artificial and unnecessary. Using the map to avoid the
invisible walls is impossible since the only map is a satellite
photograph which shows nothing since the world is filled with more
vegetation than a three days old forgotten cheese sandwich.
Silverain here just to expand a little further on the technical aspects of the game, it is very poorly optimised and even computers that have far beyond the capabilities to run the game will experience slow down and the occasional sluggishness as it demands far more CPU power than it really should require. Case in point my own play through with Haxmonster (See Below) was forced short as the Dead Island would often cause my CPU to overheat.
So the
game really discourages exploration and prefers that you just drive
everywhere in a car. Cars make you nigh invincible since the zombies
apparently never played GTA when they were still alive and can’t
figure out that they can simply pull the car door open and pull me
out. Of course they can damage cars but I got through the entire game
without one car ever being destroyed.
You
might get the impression that Dead Island is quite an easy game with
the overpowered kick attack and indestructible cars and you would be
completely right to deduce that. I could finish most of the game with
only Silverain tagging along or just by myself. I am not even sure if
‘insultingly easy’ covers it. Zombies usually move very slowly,
can’t open doors or climb ladders and, worst of all, there are next
to no consequences when you die. You respawn mere meters from your
death with all damage you did to zombies still remaining. All you
lose is a percentage of money and using money is very much optional.
You can pay money to repair or upgrade weapons but if you just
complete enough quests, and you will since that’s the only activity
in the game, you are constantly loaded down with better weapons to
replace the broken ones. Speaking of optional, fighting zombies in
it’s entirety is optional as well. Often you can just run past all
zombie hordes and close a door behind you, which they can’t open,
and you are safe for ever.
If you want to see Dead Island in action you can see me and Hax Monster roam the first few areas here.
But
in conclusion I think it’s safe to say that Dead Island is fairly
amusing, provided you skip a lot of it’s repetitive, dull
sidequests. The central gameplay mechanic, the melee combat, is
satisfying and I don’t really feel like anything important is
missing from the formula. Running a zombie over or smashing is head
in is a simple kind of pleasure, but it’s undeniably fun. So, if
you still enjoy zombies at this point, disregard most of the previous
things I mentioned and pick it up!
Hang
on a minute!
I
think I’ve just realized something. As the opening paragraph of
this review revealed I believe that zombie games as a genre are more
dead than the walking corpses the genre is based around, but just
maybe the developers of Dead Island feel the same way. Fighting
zombies is optional; they are merely an occupational hazard that you
can run past. The biggest enemies are usually humans. In the third
act there is even an entire section where the game turns into Far Cry
2, and we find ourselves running through jungle slums wielding an
AK-47, fighting a war between two small militant faction leaders with
weird accents. Can we still call that a zombie game?
Suddenly
it all makes sense! Time to submit it to the ultimate zombie-game
test. I kept count of the amount of times Dead Island uses the word
‘zombie’, which one would expect to be quite a high amount since
it depicts a zombie apocalypse. The final count, however, is around…
Three.
Maybe
it’s about accents after all. Gud
on ya, ded ayland!