Dead Island Preview

Have you ever wondered where you’ll be when the zombie apocalypse takes place; Tropical Island on vacation maybe? You might not have considered it, but the folks at Deep Silver did, and it unfolds this Tuesday (September 6, 2011) in the form of Dead Island for on XBOX 360, Playstation 3, and PC.

If you’ve somehow managed to miss all of the other zombie survival horror games out there, Dead Island shares a bit of commonality with a few of them, but aside from the little bit of common ground it shares with them, it’s a departure, and even though I’m not a fan of the genre, I’m interested in getting it into my console of choice and seeing if it is what it looked to be when I met Doug from Deep Silver at PAX Prime 2011 to see what it has going for it.

Basically, Dead Island is a zombie survival horror game set in an open world where players are really only limited to not going into the ocean and some areas requiring the use of a key card to gain access. Other than that, the “huge” island setting of the game is your gory playground.

Ideally meant to be played as an online cooperative experience between four players, Dead Island can be played by as few as one human component at a time. This is where Dead Island begins to separate itself from the pack; where other games of this nature see fit to pair a player with three AI companions. Instead of sending players into a situation where they need to control a wave of hundreds of zombies, Deep Silver thought it more appropriate to put players in a situation where they’re faced with fewer opponents that are at their own level or slightly higher – depending if they’re going at it in a coop. situation.

Weapons will be important when fending off a group of seven or eight zombies at a time, and this is where more of that RPG element comes into play; boasting a weapons system like that of Diablo or World of Warcraft, players will have the option to buy, find, trade, sell, or even make their own weapons over the course of the game. The system sounded color-coded which from an accessibility standpoint, I’m not sure about, but I am told weapons will have titles such as “rare/legendary crowbar” or “legendary paddle” which was said jokingly. The ability to create your own weapons was put over quite nicely with “flaming baseball bat”, and “electric throwing knives”, and “bombs can be made out of everything – even deodorant”.

Finally, the reason we’re here – accessibility; Dead Island doesn’t look like it’s going to be a great departure from what’s usually seen from video games. The subtitles look like those seen in most every other game, the controls (though hopefully just set up this way for PAX) were bound and nothing was said about remap-ability and the way they were setup wouldn’t accommodate a single-handed player without some enjinuity/assistive technology, and visually; the game looked better graphically than others in the genre, but being as though I spent all my time at the resort, it’s hard to tell what other parts of Dead Island might hold visually. It is worth of mentioning that I love what I saw from the mini-map; it was very easy to follow, and I can’t think of a mini-map from another game that looks as good as the one seen at PAX Prime.