When I first heard of Techland’s tropical first-person-zombie-slaying RPG, my first thought was a little something along the lines of “Now Please!”
And then came the infamous reversed-time pretentious CG trailer, which went viral nearly instantly. I dont’t know how many people took that trailer to heart but after seeing gameplay videos, I knew firsthand that this game would be anything but. Additionally, the developers would go on to enforce how they’re planning on bringing the emotional toll of a zombie infection. Yet still, I remained steadfast of my predictions.
When I picked up the game for the first time on release day, I was a man beside myself enjoying the hell out of one of the most satisfying combat mechanics in any game of recent past. My friends and I would repeatedly be baffled by the number of poor reviews the game received. The game is basically everything I hoped it would be. The further I pushed through the main quest, the more the story attempted to pull at my heart strings. I can honestly say that in my 60+ hours of two playthroughs and hitting level 50 with Xian (my personal favorite) I did not feel a tinge of emotion other than excitement during the numerous combat encounters I experienced. The sheer bloody satisfaction of undead dismemberment and decapitation was so mind-numbingly intense that I never gave emtotion a thought.
Technical glitches aside, the developers could probably have considered making player emotion an afterthought and tweaked with other aspects like NPC dialogue (Wayne’s constant blabbering of this “Scourge from outer space”)
So, with all of the poor attempts at evicting emotion aside, Dead Island is a game that simply should not be missed by anyone anticipating the plethora of releases coming out this fall. The combat is arguably the best of any first person fighter this generation, then again, there really isn’t any other game like it.
Dead Island: Emotional? No. Fun? You Bet.
