Trailer
About
Dead Island is a game set on the fictional island of Banoi. Although the gunplay is limited (and a bit clunky), the melee doesn't disappoint. The size of the world you play in is hard to determine, but it is believed to be as large as "Borderlands", "Oblivion" or "Fallout". You take the role of one of four survivors, and begin your adventure starting from your hotel room.
Review
Dead Island has made itself into my "Top 5 games of 2011" category. The world is amazingly huge, with each area featuring new scenery to prevent it from becoming stale by the end (much like what happened in "Borderlands"). The weapons, although there aren't many guns you will run into until later in the game, have a huge variety. You will use anything from shovels, pipes, and boat oars to weapons like electric machetes, ignited baseball bats, and poison daggers.
The co-op feature in the game was also well done. Although there are some occasional glitches, players (or yourself) can drop in and out of other games without affecting your quest line. For example: You have 5 quests, and are standing by a bar - if another player with approximately 5 quests is in the same area, either of you can drop into each other's game. This allows you to get quests done quickly, and adds more variety to the game.
The skills system is where the game really shines. There are three skill trees with a large variety of skills (each skill also has three tiers to make itself more powerful) - This allows you to mix and match your skills, or focus on just one tree (Survivability, Damage, or Special ability) and prevents all characters from being exactly the same.
As far as the story line goes, I found it enjoyable, but not 100% entertaining. At times I felt like dropping out of a mission, but had made it so far in that there was the fear of losing all your progress (Which really doesn't happen, you just start back at the last auto save point - ex. a door to the sewer). - There were a lot of "Fetch" missions and "Go talk to..." missions, but because the scenery was so beautiful and I always ran into many weapons and different zombie types on my travels, it prevented it from getting too stale too quickly.
There are a variety of zombies in the game as well. Although some seem to be copied from Left 4 Dead (Which are obviously inspirations to this game) they differ greatly. The "Smoker" looking zombie is the suicide zombie, whilst the "Bloat" looking character pukes on you and hinders your vision (much like L4D) and the "Charger"-like character can take you down if you don't use your wits too quickly.
Replayability is high with Dead Island. After leveling rapper "Sam B" to level 36, I was able to (after beating the campaign), start back at the beginning of the story line and maintain my level, skills, and equipment. - This lets you go through the story a second time, and find better and different weaponry as well as encounter more damaging zombies.
