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Author Topic: Dead Island  (Read 4451 times)

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Howard_Casto

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Dead Island
« on: September 23, 2011, 12:38:49 am »
I've been playing this for the last week or so, and I have mixed feelings about it, so I thought I would share. 

I'll go on record as saying that aside from RE4/RE5, this is the best Zombie game ever.  But that's kind of like saying you just pooped the best turd ever as 99% of all zombie games are terrible. 

First I need to talk about other zombie games and why they suck. 

Left4Dead:

This game sucks because it isn't even a zombie game.  Sure there are zombies in it, but they don't move, behave or in many cases even look like zombies.  With the brain dead hordes running at you full speed, yelling the whole time, the gigantic "tanks" and the other speciality zombies they could have called this game "Serious Sam:  Zombie Edition"  Also the game relies too much on guns when the whole fun of the zombie genre is melee combat.  Couple that with uninteresting settings and a generic story and it just seems like a fps with zombies slapped on.

Dead Rising:

The time-based mechanic perrty much ruins this series for me.  Regardless it has issues because there are several missions in the game that rely on gun usage and the over the shoulder view is terrible for aiming.  Also the melee combat feels unrewarding... mash a button and your character swings away... I thought we got rid of such simplistic controls in the 16bit era.  The zombies seldom feel like a threat either, with them all being a stupid, slow-moving mass.  They cna much on you for ages before you die, which kind of takes the fear away from it.  Also the HUMAN bosses, seem to have more stamina then the undead, which is retarded.  I can shoot a zombie once and it falls, but it takes over 80 shots to kill a guy in a big-boy suit???  Oh and the weapons upgrades are trivial and add nothing to gameplay.

Random Zombie DLC for Random FPS:

They all suck.  FPS are not suited to the zombie genre, because melee combat is where it's at.


Ok now for Dead Island:

The setting is great.  This is the first time we play a zombie game in an open, outdoor environment.  Also, like Dead Rising, it has a sandbox environment except this time you aren't boxed into a bunch of rooms and buildings.  Unlike Left4Dead most of the zombies behave fairly zombie-like and have a realisitic swagger, intelligence and stamina.  The combat system is fairly satisfying, despite it's flaws, and it's the first game where I felt like I was actually fighting zombies instead of shooting down random bad guys.  Although combined weapons, like in Dead Rising, are fairly useless, the weapons upgrade system is fairly satisfying and none of the available weapons seem silly or worthless.  In this respect, I feel it's the best zombie game to date.

With that being said, the game is still fairly terrible and has some critical flaws. 

First off there's this pointless money system.  You get money from doing missions or off dead bodies, when you die, you simply lose money.  So far that's ok right?  Well the thing is you spend money on fixing and creating weapons... weapons you build/repair by yourself from things you find lying around.  So where exactly are you spending the money again?  This would be excusable if the game didn't rely so heavily on you having tons of money. 

You see every weapon, even ones that should NEVER break like a sledge hammer or baseball bat take damage when you use them.  Hit 20 zombies with a weapon and it breaks....and it costs money to fix....and without a weapon you die...and lost money...and respawn without and money and a broken weapon in the same spot where the zombie(s) are...meaning you'll die yet again.  I got stuck in this infinate loop one too many times until I finally downloaded a mod for the pc version that gives each weapon a more realisitic amount of stamina, and the game finally became fun to play.

While we are on the subject, the respawn system is almost game-breaking as well.  Like a multiplayer fps, you respawn when you die, with everything still in motion (same enemies, at the same position ect...) except the respawn is at the nearest re-spawn point.  What this means is you might respawn, without any weapons, right in the middle of the 12 zombies that just killed you, only to die again.  The game is supposed to be single player as well, but it really isn't, unless you enjoy dieing over and over trying to kill the same enemy.  Also if you are on an escort mission (UGH) and you die, your poor buddy will have to fend off the zombies while you respawn and if they respawn you too far away, they might die before you can run back and defend them. 

The fighting mechanic is also flawed.  Although it's the best I've seen so far, melee controls seem a little touchy (you aim like you would a gun) and often zombies will come running up and you can't hit them because they are the dreaded short zombies, and you have to look down to pop them on the head.  They aren't midgets or anything either, they are just the slighty shorter zombies.  Guns are also pretty ineffective on zombies, which I am ok with, but it doesn't make much sense.  Guns are primarily used on human enemies though, so it's ok. 

The story is utter crap.  Not a bit of redeeming value to it.  The characters are tired stereo-types coupled with bad voice acting and even worse dialog.  You'll only see them in cut-scenes that seem completely dis-jointed from the game.  They are so poorly done that in the intro video it shows "you" staggering around drunk talking to all the other characters in the game.  The only problem is you are one of those characters, so at some point you are talking to yourself!!!

Also it seems that the story is crap in-game as well.  You see, like many zombie games, there are "special" zombies as well, that are extra strong with special abilities.  One such zombie is a gigantic prisioner in a straight jacket that looks like something out of a resident evil game.  When do they introduce him?  In a prision level?  Nope... on the streets of the city.  This sounds excusable until you learn later in the game that the prision is on it's own seperate island surrounded by landmines, meaning it would be completely impossible for these characters to appear on the main island.  They do this with all of the characters at some point, essentially putting random zombies that don't match the locale all in a lump on the later stages. 


With all of that I STILL suggest you check it out.  It's suprisingly fun to play, and at least compared to other zombie games, it's still the best.  (Again RE games excluded as they are on a whole other level)

Ginsu Victim

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Re: Dead Island
« Reply #1 on: September 23, 2011, 12:56:52 am »
You left out Undead Nightmare, which IS the best zombie game.

Howard_Casto

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Re: Dead Island
« Reply #2 on: September 23, 2011, 02:00:57 pm »
You left out Undead Nightmare, which IS the best zombie game.

Let me fix that for you:

You left out Undead Nightmare, which IS the WORST Zombie game. 

Undead Nightmare falls into the "Random Zombie DLC for Random FPS" category.  UDN is TERRIBLE.  It somehow manages to combine the ineffective controls and reliance on guns from Left4Dead with the terribly stiff melee controls of Dead Rising.  It also incorporates the terrible time-based missions of Dead Rising as well.  Combine that with horribly tedious missions like "kill every single zombie in a town, even if the game is terribly buggy and one of the zombies spawned inside a wall so you can't kill him" and "search every random building for a random person and bring them back" and it has no redeeming value what-so-ever.

I think this has more to do with rockstar making terrible games (and thus terrible game engines) though.  Anything they touch is littered with uninspiring sandboxes, akward controls, and very "video game like" mini missions.  I think Undead Nightmare had really good writing, and a decent art design and could have been great... if it were released on any other engine and made by any other game company.

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Re: Dead Island
« Reply #3 on: September 27, 2011, 07:35:12 am »
House of the Dead? That's a pretty awesome series of zombie games. From the reviews I've seen, any of them should be better than Dead island...


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Re: Dead Island
« Reply #4 on: September 28, 2011, 02:04:12 am »
I'm a few hours into Dead Island, playing it coop with a friend, and it's entertaining, but not amazing.  It's currently extremely buggy (took us 30 min of crashes before my friend and I finally got a stable gaming going last night), so I'd recommend waiting until the price drops and a few more patches get released before picking it up.

Probably the most annoying thing in the game is the fact that theres really no need to pick up any weapons or craft new ones since your kick is the ultimate weapon.  You can spam it all day long (doesn't use up your endurance), it'll never break, and it interrupts any incoming attack.  Once I decided to only use the kick in emergencies, the game became a lot more fun, but it's stupid that your forced to restrain yourself in order to enjoy the game.

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Re: Dead Island
« Reply #5 on: September 28, 2011, 09:34:16 am »
You see every weapon, even ones that should NEVER break like a sledge hammer or baseball bat take damage when you use them. 


Baseball bats break when hitting baseballs, and even an aluminum bat will deform and break when repeatedly used against something as hard and thick as a human skull.  Sledgehammers have wooden handles that can and will break, especially if you miss with the head and strike with the handle instead.  20 uses?  Yeah, that's probably an order of magnitude too low.
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Re: Dead Island
« Reply #6 on: September 28, 2011, 10:10:04 am »
Baseball bats break when hitting baseballs, and even an aluminum bat will deform and break when repeatedly used against something as hard and thick as a human skull.

You can easily break a human skull with a properly applied fist, so unless your bat is made of tin foil, I don't see it 'deforming' much after repeated use up against a human skull, sorry.  I did get a chuckle from your post mind you.

 :laugh2:

Howard_Casto

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Re: Dead Island
« Reply #7 on: September 28, 2011, 06:00:26 pm »
What Rick said....  If I were fighting alien robots with the weapons I would expect them to break quickly as I'm hitting something hard.  But we are talking about rotten corpses here. 

The break level is the equivelent of Galagher having to throw out his Sledge-O-Matic after smashing two watermelons. 

Also, just for the record, baseball bats break mostly due to age, defects or poor storage conditions and even then they break after being hit by a baseball going 80-90 mph while the bat itself is being swung roughly at 50-60 mph.  Even taking THAT into account a baseball is roughly 10 times as dense as a human head and bats break after several hundred pitches. 


Sledge hammers don't break either.  I use them regularly and let me tell you, aside from the handle just being old (and thus the wood has dried out / rotted) it takes a heck of a lot to break one.  I'm talking using it to split bolders daily.


House of the Dead is pretty awesome btw... it's just that it is a shooting gallery game so I can't really count it.  (The same goes for the RE gun games.)

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Re: Dead Island
« Reply #8 on: September 28, 2011, 06:38:49 pm »
Probably the most annoying thing in the game is the fact that theres really no need to pick up any weapons or craft new ones since your kick is the ultimate weapon.  You can spam it all day long (doesn't use up your endurance), it'll never break, and it interrupts any incoming attack.  Once I decided to only use the kick in emergencies, the game became a lot more fun, but it's stupid that your forced to restrain yourself in order to enjoy the game.

Yeah, I heard about this, on a review on the escapist by a dude named Yahtzee. I thought he was overexagerating as usual, but a few friends have played it and they told me the exact same thing. Kinda lame.
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Re: Dead Island
« Reply #9 on: September 29, 2011, 08:37:57 am »

I use them regularly ...  I'm talking using it to split bolders daily.


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Re: Dead Island
« Reply #10 on: September 29, 2011, 09:53:12 am »
Baseball bats break when hitting baseballs, and even an aluminum bat will deform and break when repeatedly used against something as hard and thick as a human skull.

You can easily break a human skull with a properly applied fist, so unless your bat is made of tin foil, I don't see it 'deforming' much after repeated use up against a human skull, sorry.  I did get a chuckle from your post mind you.

 :laugh2:


I did say the number of uses they allow is off by at least an order of magnitude. 

Remember, it takes more than just cracking a skull to kill a zombie.  You have to destroy the brain inside.  A hairline fracture isn't going to cut it.  You've got to significantly pulp the brain inside.  And these aren't Rotting corpses, they're freshly reanimated zombies.  The rot and decomposition takes a while to set in.  You're not likely to cave in the skull on the first hit, especially with a limited opposing resistance from the Zombie's neck.  More than likely, you'll need to knock the zombie down, and follow up with a few shots on the ground. 

How long do you think an aluminum bat will hold up with full strength swings against a paved street?  Yeah, it'll be way more than 20, but it's not indefinite.

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Re: Dead Island
« Reply #11 on: September 30, 2011, 12:40:21 am »
Baseball bats break when hitting baseballs, and even an aluminum bat will deform and break when repeatedly used against something as hard and thick as a human skull.

You can easily break a human skull with a properly applied fist, so unless your bat is made of tin foil, I don't see it 'deforming' much after repeated use up against a human skull, sorry.  I did get a chuckle from your post mind you.

 :laugh2:



I did say the number of uses they allow is off by at least an order of magnitude. 

Remember, it takes more than just cracking a skull to kill a zombie.  You have to destroy the brain inside.  A hairline fracture isn't going to cut it.  You've got to significantly pulp the brain inside.  And these aren't Rotting corpses, they're freshly reanimated zombies.  The rot and decomposition takes a while to set in.  You're not likely to cave in the skull on the first hit, especially with a limited opposing resistance from the Zombie's neck.  More than likely, you'll need to knock the zombie down, and follow up with a few shots on the ground. 

How long do you think an aluminum bat will hold up with full strength swings against a paved street?  Yeah, it'll be way more than 20, but it's not indefinite.




Have you played the game?  Because you hit the zombies while they are standing.  You never hit the street (unless your aim is terrible) and reagardless the game takes the same amount of damage away no matter what you hit. 

And yes, in the bounds of a game that only lasts around 8 hours, my bat should last "forever". 

pbj:  heh

dervacumen:

When you live in the country you have many uses for a sledge.  Busting up rocks, busting up stumps, ect...  I use mine a lot. 

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Re: Dead Island
« Reply #12 on: October 01, 2011, 03:08:57 pm »
Yeah, I was makin a funny.

So I've played this on PC for about 4 hours maybe.  I think I'm level 11.
I agree with a lot of your assessment.  The money thing is goofy, the crafting system IMO is severely underutilized, but since the damn weapons break constantly what's the point of either upgrading or modifying anyway?  Until I reached about level 9, I didn't even use weapons because I was afraid they would decay and I'd be SOL.  That reduced the game to a kicking game with the occasional punch.  It wasn't until level 9 that I was unable to fend off swarms by myself without dying.
About every aspect of the PC interface is very clumsy which doesn't help.

All that said, the ease of jumping in to and out of multiplayer is nice and it really is a lot of fun to explode and chop up zombies.  I wish I felt compelled to search for better weapons like I do in Borderlands, because that's what keeps me playing.  It's a good thing your apparently adamantium leg doesn't wear out as fast as the lead pipe you just picked up.:dizzy:

I'm still trying to figure out if I like this game, and if so why.  It's got all the right parts but they're kinda jury-rigged together.  If a real engineer (the mod community or a massive fix) reworks it, it might find another life.
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Re: Dead Island
« Reply #13 on: October 15, 2011, 03:39:57 pm »
Okay, still playing.  It's growing on me.  The control interface is still frustrating, but I like that you almost can't just run and gun anything, no matter how much you think you can.  The swarms always get you.  It gets a little repetitive going over the same terrain over and over if you're in to completing side quests, especially since on the PC it seems either confusing or not possible to complete multiple quests in the same area simultaneously.  Like stuff isn't active or even present unless you have that quest active when you're in the area.

Since I got an orange stick and upgraded it, it lasts like there's no tomorrow.  I've never seen it degrade past 80% by the time I happened along a repair bench.
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Re: Dead Island
« Reply #14 on: October 16, 2011, 12:58:44 am »

I use them regularly ...  I'm talking using it to split bolders daily.


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