Dead Island Review

Within a few hours that oar will be upgraded to a sledgehammer, and that frying pan could well be a machete. And that's not even getting into the weapon customisation yet. Yes, all of the weapons in the game can be upgraded and customised. What does this mean? It means you can have exploding knives and sledgehammers that emit huge electric pulses on impact - awesome.

The only downside is that these weapons will degrade over time and until you start upgrading your character, it feels as though these weapons degrade far too quickly. It's a necessary evil though, as it emphasises the resource management you'd actually need in this situation. On one hand, you want to use the weapons to protect yourself, but on the other you always want to make sure you at least have something handy. So, if you're on the more cautious side, it means you'll more often than not end up using your fists, so you always have your weapons for a back-up if things start getting crazy. If you're on the aggressive side, you'll end up going through weapons like there's no tomorrow which means you'll also end up using your fists.

There's also an RPG system implemented in the game, although it does feel a bit disjointed. It's understandable that you yourself would be able to get stronger and get new abilities, but there's no real reason why the zombies had to go through the same thing. Since the game is open world, they could have just made different parts feature zombies of ranging difficulties. Instead, they ended up with a system where the zombies towards the end of the game are pretty much the same strength as the zombies in the starter areas. So even if you go back to do easier side-quests later on, they actually aren't any easier. And in some instances, they may even be harder.

It really just epitomises Dead Island. For every good decision, there's always something that's questionable. For example, there's a huge glitch which is the result of how the game handles death. The single-player campaign works on the premise that you're playing with some imaginary friends. So, when you die, it tells you that you can still be revived by non-existent people. Once it realises that's not possible, you respawn - sometimes absolutely miles away - but everything is how it was before. Enemies have the health they did when you died, and you have the same resources too. That is, unless you're on an escort mission. In this instance, if the person you're escorting dies, the game actually loads a previous checkpoint and things are all reset to how they were - or so you think. All the enemies return to how they were yes, but all of your resources get drained to how they were when the NPC died.