E3 2011 Co-Op Hands On: Dead Island a Frankenstein of popular zombie franchises

Sunday, June 19, 2011

Dead Island so far appears to be an amalgamation of most of the great gameplay elements made popular by other zombie game brethren. If Dead Island is anything, it’s not the zombie shooting gallery one would expect it to be. Take the addicting and generally rewarding RPG shooter elements of Borderlands, the comical gore and melee combat of Dead Rising, the co-op elements of Left 4 Dead, and you have Dead Island.

I sat down to play co-op with three other games writers and the 30-40 minute experience I had flew by. In its current beta form, most of the animations were place holders until their final versions are finalized. The framerate of the Xbox 360 version held up at around 30 frames per second despite the vast size of each zone. It took around 30 minutes to get through only 50 percent of the zone we were playing and each zone is only about 8 to 10 percent of the entire island to give you an idea how large the world is.

Upgrade, collect quests, and repair in safe zones!

Churches in the game act as safe houses where you can pick up quests, repair items, and buy new weapons. In each safe zone there’s a workbench, which is an integral part of the game. Here you’ll repair weapons because of the nature of the melee focused combat. Weapons you pick up will dull and breakdown emphasizing the survival portion of the gameplay. At each bench you’ll also be able to upgrade your weapon’s damage and durability. Lastly, you can modify your weapons by adding mods to them. One of the mods I added was a shock mod which had a proc (chance on hit) to electrocute zombies leaving them incapacitated.

Because of the scarcity of ammo, the focus here is on melee combat. If played like a normal hack and slash game you’ll quickly find out that you’re only leaving yourself defenseless. Swinging your weapons is limited to your stamina. Each swing chips away at your regenerating stamina, for each missed attack is a missed opportunity and a greater risk of having to run away and recuperate. Each limb depending on if you have sharp weapons, can be cut off much like in the gameplay video reveals for example disabling and cutting down their speed. Aiming for the head also, is encouraged.

If I aimed my crosshair on zombie’s head on the ground and curb stomped it, blood oozed and gushed from the infected’s jugular. That was pleasing to see. The controls and character movement have a significant weight to them. Dead Island doesn’t move like Left 4 Dead, it’s much more realistic and acceptable from normal human beings. Still, the movement felt a bit too clunky which I mentioned to one of the developers. He responded that they’re still balancing it, but the way the controls were presented was intentional.

Ammo is scarce, use guns mainly to explode propane tanks. Rain increases effects on electrifying zombies, too.

You’re not going to be fighting the typical layman zombie. In the demo we ran into a particularly large zombie that would ram into you fittingly named The Ram. The dodging mechanic in Dead Island was showcased here along with carrying and throwing propane tanks. To dodge, one simply has to press A and the direction one would like to dodge to compensate for the realistic movement speeds. My partners died a couple of times, but it was okay because they could either be revived once more or use a health pack on themselves borrowing Left 4 Dead‘s mechanics.

A feature I had to check out was the lobby system. Since singleplayer will not have AI to play alongside with, it’s recommended to play with 3 others for a fuller experience. The game scales as you add more players like Borderlands and the system Techland has implemented should be drop in drop out.

The PC version will also be ran through Steam and the specs of the game aren’t ready to be released yet. It’s confirmed that Dead Island on PC will ship with Direct X 10 with a consideration to update to DX 11 later on when plans are hashed out later down the road.

Dead Island appeared to be a Frankenstein of several popular zombie gameplay mechanics and RPG loot grinding. That’s probably why I liked what I played issues aside.

Dead Island releases later this year.