Time to rethink that vacation. Much like its once-idyllic location, Dead Island isn't as it first appears. It's got zombies in it, but it's not a survival horror game. It's played in a first-person perspective and has shooting, but it's not a first-person shooter. And whatever that slow-motion trailer would have you believe, it's not a stirring emotional experience.
Dead Island is a schlocky, open-world action role-playing game that favours grisly melee combat above all things. Just another friendly islander. Dead Island's expansive sandbox setting spreads inland, beyond the Royal Palms Resort into city and jungle environments.
Its RPG nature is clear in the prominence of quests, doled out by harrowed survivors in the makeshift shelters that form quest hubs.
Similarly prominent are RPG staples such as talent trees and numbers, always the numbers: levels, weapon stats, damage, and experience point scores popping out of enemies as you hack away. There are also satisfyingly vicious weapons to be improvised, upgraded, and creatively modded, and a robust online system supports the four-player co-op in which the game is best enjoyed. Its failings are many but minor, for the most part. The quality of visuals is uneven. Ditto the voice acting. The characters are weak, and the story is a flimsy hook on which to hang the action.
Combat is unrefined, and never more so than in the humdrum sections that pit you against shooting human enemies barely smarter than their undead equivalents. The prevalence of drab quests in sewers in the second act is likewise off-putting. All the flaws and missteps amount to a game that is frequently ropey but, thanks to its ambition and scale, nearly always entertaining.
There's nothing perfect about what Dead Island does, but it does so much, and does it well enough to give you a good time. A Royal Palms Resort blood bath. The bulk of your time on Banoi is spent exploring and questing, roaming from hub to hub, foraging items to build weapons or complete missions.
Zombies can sometimes be avoided: you can often run around them, amassing a slavering, jogging zombie horde in your wake. More fun, though, is hopping into one of the game's multi-seater vehicles, mowing down the undead as you speed along the island's roads. Some of the best times Dead Island has to offer are those spent cruising in a truck with three friends in cooperative mode, zombies shedding experience points as they bounce off the bonnet. Dead Island also shines in missions that have you risk life and limb in a sortie to a petrol station, and are best experienced in co-op.
You can freely explore the island whenever you want, obviously running into zombies in the first five seconds, maintaining the realistic quality ironicly. The co-op is very fun, allowing you to join a friend or stanger's game at any time. I personally gained some new friends from playing co-op. The game focuses mainly on melee weapons, which is suprisingly good. Try it for free right now. Dead Island - Reveal Tribute Trailer Watch this classical music tribute to the original Dead Island reveal trailer, which originally debuted 5 years ago at E3 When Will Zombie Games Die?
Show me more. When guns do show up later in the game, they are only passable; Dead Island doesn't excel as a shooter.
The guns would be a welcome change of pace in combat, at least, if they didn't come hand in hand with the living, breathing human enemies carrying them. Like many zombie stories, Dead Island is determined to teach us that humans are the real monsters; you occasionally face off against gangs of smugglers, guards, and opportunist punks, but the clashes are mostly tedious sweep-and-clears, turning a brisk action game into a so-so shooter.
They feel tacked on, seemingly without even situation-specific voice acting from the player characters: one screams her usual zombies-are-eating-me line "They're tearing me apart! Levelling is par for the course in a role-playing-heavy action RPG, complete with talent trees for customising characters which offer, for instance, options to increase damage or durability of certain weapon types.
You level up quickly as well, thanks in part to frequent checkpointing and the minimal penalty for dying: a death tax that skims off a little of the money you've earned by completing missions and scrounging from abandoned suitcases.
If you die, you generally respawn a few metres from where you dropped, ready to plunge back into the zombie fray. It's a generous system, though it minimises any sense of dread or tension. What do vegan zombies eat? Any remaining traces of terror are wiped out by the characters themselves, who run the gamut from flat to flat and obnoxious. There are two basic personalities among the four playable characters: both of the female characters are disillusioned cops trying to make it in a man's world, both of the men are faded superstars trying to recapture former glory days.
Their voice acting is equally lacklustre in sharp contrast to the cast of zombies, whose groans and angry screeches are alarmingly good. Thankfully, cutscenes are skippable. The game starts stronger than it finishes, with the first act host to the most visually attractive, most open-feeling location: the beach resort itself. On the other hand, later acts deliver the blueprints for the best mods, so you can at least have exotic hardware for hacking through the enemy in the second act's overlong, under-fun sewer sections.
Besides, you can start a second game with all the inventory and character progress of your first, letting you do battle with level-appropriate enemies and your best weapons back in the winning environment of the Royal Palms Resort.
Here, among the palm trees and beach huts and gleaming spilt blood, the game looks its best; later, the environment designs are much less inspiring, and poorer compensation for the stiff character animation. A quest-led trip to Ocean View Bungalows. Dead Island deserves credit for backing its multiplayer-favouring action with a reliable system for joining up with other players online.
We played online for hours without a hitch, with equally smooth experiences playing alongside friends and match-made strangers. If you play alone, the other three characters aren't added in under computer control, though they still appear in cutscenes. As a sandbox action role-playing game based on killing zombies with friends, Dead Island is a proposition rich with possibilities, and it exploits a good deal of them, if imperfectly.
There's easily 20 hours of content in a single playthrough--much more if you're exploring the Polynesian paradise sandbox and messing around with trucks as much as you should be. If you don't step off the boat expecting a taut horror experience, a masterful gun game, or compelling characters, you'll have a bloody good time.
Dead Island is a first-person shooter that pits you on an island full of zombies.
0コメント