Thrik

Dead Island fails to live up to its name and is in fact alive

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It's not so much the gore or the impact of it (though that is a factor, sure), it's that it takes it from "run up to enemy and mash on melee attack" to "when surrounded by 3 walkers and a thug, break the thug's arms so that it can't damage you, then take down the walkers while he's ineffective and finish him off at the end once the things that can hurt you are dead." It's such an important extra level of strategy that everything gets stepped up to a completely different plane of quality. Very cool stuff.

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But that already happens -- I can already target limbs. Although admittedly it doesn't always seem to work. So it's much easier to hit the targeted part with the analog controls?

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Yeah, and the directional swinging makes a big difference. If that is a thing with mouse + keyboard, it's not a thing I've been able to get to work. Also, it's hard to describe the feel of swinging the items yourself (I picked the blunt weapons guy), but it really does make the game feel unique. When I used mouse + keyboard, I felt like I could be playing any number of video games. When I used my 360 pad with analog control, I know I'm playing Dead Island. That feeling alone makes me want to keep playing Dead Island.

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Wow, I made it to the point where he threw the item over the fence and then switched it off. That was practically unwatchable. Who wants to listen to some one do the equivalent of jam a remote control up their arse over repairing items?

I like the degradable weapon systems, and that just sounds like the worst nerd rage ever. Embarrassing.

You know he's acting, right?

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Yeah, I didn't at first but it was more because I couldn't understand when anyone would act like that.

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Boy, I wish this thread was just called Dead Island.

Just finished another session of this. Steam tells me I've played a total of ten hours. If you have a couple of friends who are willing to do the co-op with you, this is one of the best long-running co-op games I've played. There's so much fun to be had here if you're playing through the whole thing as a group. I know almost everyone in the world has bought this game by now, but if you're one of the few remaining people on the fence, and you know you'll be able to get co-op going, fucking buy this.

God, I hope they're working on another co-op game.

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Okay, so we just finished this game, and spent about 25 hours in total on it. Unsurprisingly, it gets progressively worse as you get towards the terrible end. In the first area, the island, there's that great feeling of having a huge, unexplored place that you gradually explore and get to know. You unlock new ways of traversing it, and there's a convenient fast travel that lets you move from hub to hub easily, whilst still requiring you go actually drive or walk to reach mission goals. The island is a good location, as it's recognisable, but with the twist that it's full of zombies (a pool full of of blood and zombies, bungalows with infected tourists, etc.) There's a beach, and a hotel, and a lighthouse and a gas station and everything.

The second main location is also great at first, since it takes a lot of the game play you're used to and changes fundamental parts so that you have to adjust to the new environment, find new tactics, and there's some new enemy types which are fun, though not very novel. However, it really starts to drag out, and the lack of fast travel locations here forces you to run up and down the same paths a lot of times, and the repetitiveness starts being very apparent, especially as you've already spent quite a few hours playing at this point.

Then the third and fourth locations are even less interesting, since there's not really anything new, just lots of more quests – all of which, by the way, are super-simple and seldom exciting at all. Now you're sort of hoping things will speed up and you want to be done with it, but instead of becoming more interesting they just make you run back and forth a lot more, with even less fast travel locations.

And of course the last location is the worst, and you're tired of everything and have to do a bunch more boring shit just to get to the end, which of course is dumb.

As a single player game I don't know how anyone would even get halfway through this. As a co-op thing, though, it's good fun all the way.

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What the hell. I just noticed a copy of Dead Island - Game of the Year Edition in my steam inventory. If anyone wants it, PM me your Steam avatarhandle.

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What the hell. I just noticed a copy of Dead Island - Game of the Year Edition in my steam inventory. If anyone wants it, PM me your Steam avatarhandle.

You are a cool person!

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I started playing this again since I wanted to clear my backlog somewhat. I still like it, but it's going a bit slow. I've played 25h already, and I feel like I would easily be done with it by now. I haven't seen as much variety as was promised (e.g. there have been hints of a jungle but I'm still bashing heads in the shanty town), and that's what keeps me going, but I also somehow got a bit obsessive-compulsive for some reason and want to solve all quests in each area before moving on.

So the thing is that you move from point A to point B rather slowly -- due to the player character being slower than in most games and also because there's always tens of leveled-up zombies in your way. I think the game would work much better if it was harder in some other way but had less zombies (for example only the miniboss types, with only an occasional horde of regular Walkers/Infected), or if some routes would stay clear so you could backtrack more easily.

Another thing that is tied to that is that the slowness of the pace amplifies the feeling that so much of the content is filler. There are only so much ways you can bash zombie heads and I would like to be done with it in 20h or so, but it looks like it might be a 50. Maybe if it wouldn't try to be this hub-based thing so much... I think a more linear set of goals would work fine in this game.

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Aaargh.. so now I was finally heading to the jungle, got in the armored truck... and noticed I had still one quest to do in the hotel area. I got out of the car and ran towards the hotel bungalows. Some timer appeared telling me to get back to the vehicle. I ignored it. When it ran out, the quest failed, and all I could do was load last save, which starts at the hotel. And there's no way to run from the hotel to the car quick enough because the quest timer will start again! WTF!? Screwed am I?

Whew. There was a workaround where you had to quit to the menu and then it might load you at another place. Luckily it loaded me right beside the vehicle now. http://www.dead-island.com/forums/dead-island-tech-support/2721-devastator.html

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Why do they make these games so long? I'm 85% through and that's been 35 hours. There used to be a time when many people were complaining that games were too short. Now I really feel like some of them are too long. Ass Creed 3 is supposedly a 100 hour game? That, frankly, makes me want to play it less than if it were 5 hours, or actually to not play it at all.

Anyway, glad I'm finally getting close to finishing this. It's been a good game with some awesome moments.

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I think with open world games it's sometimes really nice when they're long, as you get so immersed in the world and it leaves a really lasting impression on you as an experience. My memories of the excellent Ass Creed 2 are extremely good, same for Red Dead Redemption. It's almost like I'm remembering a past life, man. Some do try and push it too far though, and the gameplay just becomes stretched so thin and becomes so repetitive you start to resent every quest the game throws at you.

Outside of open world though, games are still pretty short — excessively so in many cases. I guess they have to be because almost everything is unique, whereas open world is more about creating an environment and turning it into a labyrinth of missions while teasingly locking certain parts of it away until later. Somewhat like a roller coaster compared to bumper cars. Uncharted 3 was so good, but it seemed to pass so quickly. ;(

I guess there's no perfect length for a game. The Metal Gear Solid series has come pretty close, though.

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I agree that Dead Island is way too long however. By the last chapter I was just slogging through to get to the end.

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Whew! Finally finished, and immediately uninstalled. I'd say there was about 60% of good game there. What I enjoyed most was the survival type thing where I had to go scavenge some gas for a car, or some food for someone, while avoiding the undead and bashing their heads in. And then driving over them with a car, crashing into a lamp post, then getting on the roof and hitting them from above while they aimed their grabby hands at me in vain.

Of course the story seemed really Video gamey (in a bad way) from the start and I mostly ignored that, but it also turned out many missions were these fetch quests repeated again and again. "Hey, my friend is dying here, and despite having 20 or more of my tough-looking buddies around, I can't be arsed to stop scratching my balls and want you four to go fetch his medicine from exactly where I know it is."

But yeah, there was definitely something to it, like the ad-hoc weapons, the brutal melee combat, the tougher miniboss zombies, some cool areas to explore, and so on.

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What a bullshit insincere apology. It's like they're passing the buck, blaming it on the Brits and the Aussies. No accountability. It should be "we've made a poor decision, our mistake" not "We sincerely regret this choice" I wonder what the other choices were

The few prototypes they made will probably go for hundreds on eBay :)

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What a stupid cheap figurine, should have been a zombie head or something.

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Holy shit, that is... Wow, how did that happen?

How did that idea get through enough people to be revealed to the public?

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