Diehard GameFAN: Dead Island Review

DHGF: Dead Island is a game that has a lot of lofty ideas and goals, and it’s very impressive in that it manages to make many of them work, but some obvious balancing issues combined with some serious technical flaws make it a game that’s a lot harder to love than it should be. The story does a good job of carrying things along, save for a less than satisfying ending sequence, the graphics are serviceable, if somewhat technically hampered, and the audio is generally quite good. The gameplay should be instantly familiar to FPS fans and easy to learn for new players, but there are also some useful additional gameplay mechanics, as well as some well implemented RPG elements, that make the game its own thing. There’s also a lot of replay value to the game, between the large amount of content and variety on the disc and the promise of DLC, that make the game seem like it’s one that’s worth investing in. However, the game also comes with an assortment of noticeable and painful bugs, such as save game corruption, item deletion, infinitely spawning enemies, and more that really need to be patched before the game can be considered “complete”. Additionally, the game has some balancing issues, between a lack of defensive items and blocking abilities, a stamina system that feels like it’s fighting the player, and spawning metrics that drown the player in unwinnable battles at times, that make it hard to recommend to anyone but the best players. -