(Review archived from January 20, 2016)
This game is a jack of all trades master of none. It’s a first person brawler, a driving game, a FPS, it has RPG styled skill trees, etc. The trouble with this is that so many of its ideas seem a little half-baked as a result, which ultimately leaves one with the impression that the developers were just trying to cram in features for the sake of cramming in features. Ten pounds of shit in a five pound bag if you will. The crazy part about all this is that it totally works. Sure there are parts of the game which seem slightly janky (ahem … the driving sections) but all of these disparate parts somehow manage to gel together into a fun and horror filled end product. I do wish there were more island sections in Dead Island though. Of the four acts that comprise the game only one of them relies heavily on the island setting, and the rest are environments we’ve seen in countless other FPS and zombie games (a jungle, an urban setting, and a prison respectively). Don’t get me wrong, all the environments are executed nicely, it’s just the bulk of them sort of have a “been there, done that” quality to them. At the end of the day though, I had a nice time with this one. At some point I’d like to go back for some co-op action, but for the time being, I think I’ll be setting it aside. “Who do you voodoo, bitch,” indeed.
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