Dead Island: The first hour

After Ready Up’s visit to Deep Silver to play Dead Island’s excellent multiplayer last month, we were all the more excited to get our hands on the single player game. Now that we’ve had the chance to play through the first hour of the game a few times it’s clear that we’ve still only had the tiniest taste of what the game has to offer but what we have seen is indeed pretty tasty.

You can choose between four characters, a la Left 4 Dead, and you’ll find yourself waking up in a hotel room to face the worst morning after the night before you’ve ever had. Once you make it to a safe room after rifling through hotel guests luggage and taking the fastest elevator trip of your life you’ll quickly find yourself wandering beaches and resort fronts with a paddle in hand on a variety of quests doled out by various hotel guests. I found myself fixating on finding weapons of various types as all of them felt different when swinging them into the face of a bikini or Speedo clad zombie. There weren’t any guns available early on but you could upgrade your melee weapons and collect a variety of parts to create your own. The leveling up, although a simple skill tree, also allows you to use more powerful weapons once you’re a little more powerful. For more details on the games mechanics check out Duncan’s preview.

After a few basic missions you’ll pick up a bunch from different survivors that will see you making your way across the sprawling island of Banoi collecting items and clearing areas of the undead. It’s once you start exploring that you realise how big the island is and how detailed your environment can be, with every poolside paradise and beachfront hideaway filled with a plethora of the remnants of what started out as a lovely holiday.

Dead Island, or Zombie Holibags as I like to call it, combines elements of some of the best games of the last few years. It’s part Left 4 Dead, part Just Cause, part Far Cry and part Dead Rising. It’s not completely derivative, though. The story, characters and emergent gameplay in co-op bring its own charms to light. We had been hoping, though, to get a better handle on the stories of the four playable characters and to see whether we would connect on a deeper level with the situation they find themselves in. Whether Dead Island can really live up to that epic first trailer that demanded your attention and shocked you into an emotional connection with it back in February is still an issue in the wind. As great as that first hour of gameplay is and as much as we were left desperate for more, the story will have to have blue azure oceans of depth to live up to our best hopes and expectations.