dead island

[mogzilla]

rented this last night and its good! not great but good!

  quibbles include degrading weapons (paddles made of wood i cannunderstand but a metal morning star!?)
the island seems a bit confusing sometimes which helped me get lost a lot!

  once i got hold of a truck that makes forsome nice zombie splatting but it is an indestructable truck! apart from a broken window it can survive owt! i even crashed in a swimming pool and could drive stright out!!!

   the graphics are ace and the zombs are lovely and varied so far walkers are the standard slow enemy, infected are the 28 days later fast nutters  and the thug is a tank zombie that knocks a huge chunk of health in one swing... (tip,dash in and out and try to break his arms)

like i said its good but not ground breaking and ive gotten bored so it may be a dip in/ out game
im sure it gets better as you progress but it can be a slog and without any guns so far can get a little tedious with the bludgeoning especially if you get swarmed.

  think far cry 2 with zombies and a paddle!


   one major gripe with the story is why ,on an island FULL of paddles and loads of boats can you not just bugger off to the mainland

[SmallBlueThing]

Did a walkthrough of this the other day, and it looks impressive to a luddite like me, who still thinks of Track & Field coin-op when video games are mentioned.

However MUCH MORE exciting is the fact that there's a tie-in novel, written by famous and very good Brit horror author MARK MORRIS, which I saw for £6.99 in Game today.

SBT

[Gothmog]

PC version has it's fair share of bugs/glitches along with...
You move like you're carrying a heavy weight throught treacle, slowly building up momentum to a reasonable-ish speed then grinding to a halt again if you attempt to strafe.
NPCs like to call you mate as infuriatingly as possible.
You'll be referred to as he/him in cutscenes even if you're playing as one of the female characters.
Can't use a gun until lvl 10 (even the highly trained gun specialist!)
Clunky inventory system that seems to randomly decide whether to put that thing you picked up into your inventory or into your hand to be used immediately.

Having said that I'm having great fun at the moment, it's sort of Dead Rising meets Borderlands with zombie templates from Left4Dead.  There's something very cathartic about jump kicking a zombie to the floor then dispatching it with kerb stomp, running round trying to break/sever their limbs or mowing them down in a vehicle.
Throw in some bonkers craftable weapons and it gets better.
But I can appreciate why many people won't like it, could be a modern cult classic.

[Professor Bear]

I really wanted to love this - thought this would be like a zombie version of Fallout, and I was sort of right in that it's bugged to fuckery on release.
Some really noticeable technical problems like clipping, the textures on some weapons either not loading or being low-res, sound clips not playing correctly, and the text onscreen telling you to do the exact opposite of what the game and the Aussie bloke have been telling you to do for the last few minutes causing some confusion quite early.  The graphics are oddly calibrated, with no option for some tvs to pick up darker shades if they're using a HDMI output so you get a rather badly-contrasted picture for the most part, poor combat mechanics, and a respawn system straight out of a multiplayer game every time you buy the farm that takes you out of the story - hated it in Borderlands, and time has not mellowed me.
It basically plays as a rather bugged first-person version of Dead Rising, and don't get me wrong I liked Dead Rising, but until your character hit a certain level the game was frustrating and occasionally unplayable, with multiple deaths and restarts necessary to get a character who isn't useless for the purpose of playing the game in which he appears.  Dead Island is rather definately this kind of game, and I think after a month or so there'll be a patch to address a few issues meaning that early purchasers/renters won't be getting the best gaming experience from it that they could.

I should like this game a lot more than I do, but it's just not where it should be in terms of development.  I'll maybe play it for a few hours more, then wait a few weeks to see if there's a patch before trying it out again.  Waiting would be my recommendation to anyone considering getting it.

[radiator]

Edge gave it a 3/10. Frankly I never got excited about it in the first place - it always looked like the developer had bitten off far more than they could chew.

[MR. ELIMINATOR]

I got this game today. I guess it's good to have for a bit of fun, but it's not addictive. The earlier reference far cry 2 with zombies, my thoughts exactly. Quite surprised it's reviews scored so high for such an average game. And it's not like they are at least trying something bold and failed, just standard zombie basher with basic rpg elements.

[Hoagy]

Honestly? From the word go it looked like it wasn't going get in near a top of my list. It's marketing looked rushed, the concept looked rushed and static.

I thought it was me, looking for something different, but so far my gut was making sense. Well these reviews are a comforting to me.