Dead Island (play)

In light of Deep Silver’s recent announcement of Dead Island: Riptide, I’ve been trying to figure out why I beat the first game. Story is the predominant determining factor in whether or not I even play a game, and aside from some interesting NPCs, Dead Island really had no story beyond GET OFF THE DAMN ISLAND (ZOMBIES). The whole game is one long fetch quest in exchange for four Golden Tickets (Zombie Chocolate Factory? Now that’s a game I’d play). Humorously, the four main characters pick up on the flimsiness of the plot, calling out the people you can’t trust way in advance, as if they too had seen this movie before. A great main character (or characters) can sometimes make up for a weak plot, but Dead Island’s four protagonists’ only glimmers of character are their weapon specialties and some mild bickering in about 90 seconds worth of cutscenes. At some point, I just started to refer to them as Knife, Gun, Phil LaMarr, and Texan.

But despite having almost no story, I enjoyed playing Dead Island, at least up until the sewers and the prison levels when fetch fatigue set in. I think it was because of a few simple gameplay elements: the loot/crafting system, the melee combat, and how death was handled. Loot was done as in most Diablo-esque loot games. There is loot out there that’s better than the loot you have; go get it. The crafting system was where the loot really shined though. Anything you picked up in the game could be crafted into a weapon provided you found the recipe for the weapon. This led to some great tongue-in-cheek moments as you barreled down hallways with a flaming machete or a deodorant bomb.  I looked forward to crafting things just to see what was possible, as opposed to, say, Skyrim’s crafting, which became a grind to get to Dragon Armor.

The Skyrim comparison also bears in melee combat. The Elder Scrolls games take some light heckling for their combat system being essentially two people hacking at each other with swords, axes, etc., until one of them falls down. But Techland has nailed first-person fighting. While the gun play just meets par, the melee is visceral, sharp, and reactive. Hit a zombie at the right angle and it loses an arm, or a leg, or a head. Miss with just a couple of swings or get distracted for a few seconds and you’re the one losing a head. This is how fighting should feel in a zombie game, like you could die at any minute. The developers balanced this propensity to die with a forgiving respawn. While you lose in-game resources in the form of cash, you only lose a few seconds of that most important of real-world resources, time. You’re punished, but not in the form of restarting half-a-mile away from where you died.

While I enjoyed most of my Dead Island playthrough, I know I’m never going to go back to it, nor can I say that I plan to pick up Riptide. On top of the lack of story and unending fetch structure, the leveling system, which is usually a major draw for me (I’ll play Magic Pony Sparkle Horse if I can upgrade my pony’s mane for more sparkle and his saddle to hold four rocket launchers instead of two), was weighed down by incremental improvements that didn’t have much impact on the gameplay. Oh cool, a +2% chance of a critical hit. Oh cool, an edged weapons +5% damage bonus. Leveling up was just something I did because a Level Up message kept popping on screen. The question of Riptide is the same as most sequels; can they hold onto the things that worked and improve upon the things that did not? Given the mediocre DLC released so far, I’m inclined to believe that Riptide will just be more of the same, not a 2.0 or 1.5 so much as a 1.1.