Knights of the Cardboard Castle

I looked forward to playing Dead Island. I really did. Part of it is because I missed out on Dead Rising, because Steam won’t sell it in Malaysia. Part of it is because like everyone else I watched the fantastic trailer of the game and was enthralled. I have to say that I was disappointed on almost all counts.

• It turns out the award-winning trailer wasn’t made by the developers at Techland anyway and has nothing to do with the game at all. The story here is terrible, seriously terrible. It has no purpose other than to offer a very thin justification to shuttle your characters from one quest hub to another hub. NPCs who were important mysteriously drop off the radar when you move to the next quest hub. Remember that head lifeguard who saved your life and sent you all over the island to collect supplies. Whatever happened to him after you get to the jungle? Who knows and your characters seem to act as if he and everyone else in the resort area and Moresby city never existed at all because they blithely flee Banoi ahead of an impending nuclear strike without even a backwards glance.

• One reason why the original trailer worked so well is because it had real emotional resonance coupled with its non-linear narrative. Nothing, I repeat, nothing in the real game ever approaches that level of storytelling quality. Instead the game appears to think that the very height of drama is when characters agonize over killing zombies who used to be loved ones because they fall back to this trope over and over and over again. It’s tiresome, clumsy and completely ineffective.
• As you might expect from such bad writing, quest design is equally atrocious. There are a lot of quests in this game and almost every single one is a fetch quest. Go here are pick up some food, go there for some medicine, there for some fuel and so on and on and on. World design could be better either. The graphics and level design are fine. But there is no sense of place, no atmospherics, the world feels exactly like a theme park full of zombies who are only there for you to beat up on and items to collect. The multiplayer focus of the game hurts it there too because unlike single player game designs, you can’t make permanent changes to the world. Kill a zombie somewhere and it respawns the next time you come back. The same applies for items. So it feels like nothing really matters.

• All that said, there is something very addictive about bashing up zombies, again and again and again. There are guns in the game but only beginning in Act 2 and in any case ammunition is scarce so the focus is on melee combat. This means fighting zombies with things like pipes, paddles, planks, machetes, baseball bats, kitchen knives and so forth. One very cool thing about this game is that the zombies have a very detailed damage model. This means that repeatedly attacking, say, an arm, will result in severe damage visible at that location. More damage there can result in completely severing the limb. Similarly blunt weapons allow you to break a zombie’s limbs so that they hang loosely and become useless. Likewise using fire results in appropriately roasted zombies.
• Actually this game is one rare instance where the violence is gory enough to me somewhat uncomfortable. It turns out one of the most effective ways to fight zombies is knock them onto the ground (weapons have a Force attribute which presumably determines their ability to physically knock enemies about) and repeatedly bash them on the head while they are helpless. Needless to say this has disgusting results and feels morally dubious even if they are zombies.
• There are generally speaking two types of items in this game: weapons and crafting materials. You have a limited number of slots for weapons, and generally you’ll want to carry multiple redundant weapons because using them drains their durability and broken weapons do negligible damage. But you can carry unlimited amounts of crafting materials, which does feel a bit odd. Sadly you can’t craft entirely new weapons except for grenades and the like. The materials are used only to modify existing weapons, to make them hit harder or add special effects, i.e. set zombies on fire or electrocute them. The crafting system seems a lot more limited that what I’d expect.

On the whole I found this to be a very mediocre game that wears out its welcome very quickly even if the basic zombie-killing gameplay is solid. The problem is that simply bashing zombies without some sort of context to hang it around still gets old eventually. This game doesn’t even have the inventiveness of Valve’s Left for Dead games in setting up interesting tactical situations. Not recommended at all.