Fans of zombie games have had no end of fun over the past few years as new games and downloadable content for existing titles turn to the undead as a plot device and enemy. Dead Island, the latest title to feature the shambling hordes as a player’s nemesis, differentiates itself by using an open world setting and incorporating common components for role-playing games into this first-person beater (since so much of the game is based around melee combat, it seems unfair to call it a shooter).

Set on the fictional tropical island of Banoi, Dead Island makes players choose one of four characters to begin the adventure. Players will explore the various parts of the island, each with their own unique features and locations, as they try to stay alive, keep other survivors alive and get off the island in one piece.

As a real-world zombie outbreak simulation, Dead Island succeeds because players don’t find piles of guns handy. Instead, players find blunt objects suitable for melee combat – canoe paddles, pipes ripped from walls and so on. It’s improvised weaponry which is appropriate for the location and setting, but makes the game – even in early stages – substantially more difficult because players have to kill zombies at close range, and those zombies hit hard.

And that’s only one of the things that makes Dead Island such a maddening experience. For everything the game does right, it does something else wrong – this is true for gameplay, mechanics and even technical concerns. For every moment that feels like fun, there’s a moment so frustrating that the game should have a flying controller warning on the box.

For me, one such moment came when I died six times trying to turn in a medium difficulty mission in Moresby; zombies ran onto rooftops to chase me and knock me into mobs of other zombies, it seemed that one of every six or seven zombies was a mini-boss capable of what might as well have been one-hit kills and so on. Each time I respawned, it seemed that I hadn’t thinned out the zombies at all, and that was when the game spawned me far enough away that I had a moment to assess the situation instead of immediately trying to get zombies off of me. Unfortunately, this seems to be a typical experience. While not every moment of the game is like that, this is also what combat turns into on a fairly frequent basis.

Then there are curious game mechanics that don’t make a great deal of sense – a target reticle that moves like it’s trying to lock onto a body part but never does, an aim feature which seems to result in greater sway than aiming from the hip, and what seems to be bobbing as a player moves (and left me feeling a bit motion sick until I got used to it). There’s the maddening weapon switching (be prepared to press the right bumper a lot) which cycles through every equipped weapon with no obvious way to return to a previous weapon, there’s an inventory which allows players to carry a dozen baseball bats without upgrading but only three clips for an assault rifle after using three skill points to expand ammo capacity and so forth. We won’t even get into the massive amount of items which can be carried without respect to inventory capacity, encumbrance or any other limiting factor (including, but not limited to, steel rods, circular saw blades and boxes of bleach).

And then there are the actual technical problems – clipping, getting stuck in and on solid objects, quests that disappear from your mission list or fail to update, having to restart the game because something (a character, an object, whatever) didn’t spawn … the list of problems is fairly extensive, even on the console side (the list of technical problems for PCs still seems to be quite long, even though it’s been almost a month since release).

But all of this might be forgivable if it is patched and corrected in coming weeks – the far more fundamental problem with Dead Island is that it too often feels like a collection of ideas and mechanics gathered from other games. Gathering components and recipes for crafting feels like Fallout 3 (and, in fact, the crafting benches look very similar). Being able to select one of four characters to play is reminiscent of both Borderlands and the Left 4 Dead series. Some types of zombies seem inspired by special zombies in the Left 4 Dead series (the Suicider and L4D’s Boomer explode, there’s a zombie in a haze which looks similar to L4D’s Smoker, etc.). The drop-in co-op play, color coding for weapons based on rarity and the skill tree seem strongly influenced by Borderlands. In fact, taken as a whole, it’s not entirely unfair to say that Dead Island feels like a contemporary, real-world zombie skin for Borderlands. In other words, it’s easy to play Dead Island and spend a lot of time thinking of other games, and at least some of those games are more polished, less frustrating and undeniably better. Those games are also frequently more accessible.



Accessibility Issues / Concerns

The gamers who are most likely to experience problems with Dead Island are gamers with precision concerns and gamers with use of only one hand, and their problems are likely to be significant.

Much of the game depends on melee combat, and may involve having to fight a number of opponents at the same time. When fighting groups of enemies, precision and twitch reflexes are critical to kick zombies out of the way, swing a melee weapon and back away from opponents.

Gamers with use of only one hand need to know that the left trigger is mapped to aim, the left bumper kicks, the right trigger fires a gun or swings a weapon and the right bumper switches between weapons. The most common and useful attack in Dead Island is kicking and swinging, meaning rapidly switching between the left bumper and right trigger. In short, nearly the entire game will require rapid switching between those controls. Combat typically involves using the left bumper to kick zombies back out of their melee range and using the right trigger to attack with your equipped weapon, making it very difficult for players who only have use of one hand. Getting out of a zombie’s melee grapple requires pressing the left and right triggers in rapid succession.

Players with precision concerns need to know that breaking open doors involves a mini-game in which the player has to flick the stick upward when a moving target is over a specific location, like active reloads in many first-person shooters. Players can still break doors open if they do not succeed at this mini-game, but they must repeat the mini-game a few times to wear down the door’s durability.

An odd but critical accessibility concern in Dead Island is how long it takes to do anything. The developers clearly intend for people to play the game a certain way – move forward carefully, avoid alerting too many zombies at once, use chokepoints like doorways (when possible) to control how many attackers you’re fighting at once and so forth. Fighting even two zombies at the same time can be difficult, and fighting more than that is almost asking to get killed.

This means players need to exercise caution, but that makes for incredibly slow progress which in turn brings us to the problem – it can easily take 25 to 30 minutes to achieve the main objective for a single easy or medium difficulty mission. Turning it in and actually completing it means fighting more zombies in areas you had already cleared, and it’s an exhausting process. Considering that Dead Island doesn’t always save quest progress, starting a quest generally means having to finish it in the same gaming session, effectively requiring players to commit 45 to 60 minutes of time per session at a minimum just to complete a single quest without trying to explore the game world or get anything else done along the way. Frankly, that can be an exhausting prospect.

And that time commitment, more than any other aspect of the game, prevented me from completing the game prior to writing the review because trying to play Dead Island for any length of time frequently led to my medical issues flaring up, leaving me wondering if I’ll actually be able to finish the game.

Players with a form of color blindness shouldn’t experience many issues; Dead Island uses red and green to indicate changes in damage over a currently wielded weapon, but in the parts of the game I was able to complete, doesn’t really use color for meaning.

Players who use subtitles will experience greater difficulty – Dead Island, like many zombie games, uses quite a few audio cues. Regular zombies (Walkers) make different sounds than the speedy Infected, and Thugs and Rams have characteristic roars. These cues are not subtitled or closed-captioned, nor can players enable subtitling or closed-captioning which alerts players to those noises. Deaf players will have problems and are likely to be within range of a zombie’s attack before knowing what type of zombie it is or even where it is or which direction it’s coming from – and in the case of Thugs and Rams, that often results in death with one hit.

Dead Island, despite the number of ideas in it which seem borrowed from other titles, is a promising concept and patches and updates may actually turn it into something that is more accessible than it currently is. However, in its current state, it presents significant difficulties for a broad range of disabilities which have no remedy in sight.

At A Glance

Precision: Combat is almost constant and exhausting. Precision jumping is required in certain parts of the game and players must be close to zombies to engage in melee combat. Even so, combat in Dead Island requires targeting zombies and hitting them with blunt objects. Recommend rating of 1 out of 10.

Deaf Gamers: The game is subtitled, but different types of zombies present different dangers and make different noises. There is no option to enable closed-captioning for those sounds, meaning deaf players will often find themselves under attack with no warning. Recommend rating of 1 out of 10.

One-handed: Combat is almost constant and uses controls on both sides of the controller, requiring rapid button pressing to survive. Recommend rating of 1 out of 10.

Subtitled: Dead Island is subtitled using a stylized white font that is fairly legible and readable. However, there is no closed-captioning option to hear noises made by different zombie types, meaning players who need subtitles will be at a significant disadvantage in play. Recommend rating of 1 out of 10.

Color Blind: Dead Island makes very limited use of color for meaning, but does use red and green to compare weapon damage and other related statistics. Recommend rating of 5 out of 10.

Checkpoint / Save System: Dead Island saves when players quit the game, and also saves at certain key moments during quests. Recommend rating of 5 out of 10.

My original purchase price: $49.99
Recommended purchase price: Rent to evaluate individual accessibility before buying