Dead Island: Definitive Edition Review
August Meets October
Summer is coming to a close. It’s that time of year when half the people I know are clinging onto the last hot, sunny days, looking forward to Labor Day weekend, and the other half have already started prepping for the upcoming fall and Halloween season (myself included.) Fall keeps arriving earlier every year, and even Starbucks has jumped in on the trend by releasing their iconic pumpkin spice latte on August 25th, the earliest they’ve ever done so.
Dead Island serves as a happy medium for both of those types of people. You’re stranded on an island resort during the beginning of a zombie outbreak, the perfect amalgamation of summer beach fun, and Halloween “oh-my-God-I’m-gonna-die” scariness. It’s a survival horror game, but you probably knew that from the thumbnail image.
Welcome to Banoi
Dead Island takes place on the fictional island of Banoi, located off the east coast of Papua New Guinea, a little bit north of Australia. When you first boot up the game, you’re greeted with probably one of the best opening sequences to a game I’ve seen.
The cutscene is shot in first-person POV, following what an unnamed island party-goer sees on the night of the beginning of the zombie outbreak. He drinks, interacts with other people there, jumps up on stage during a live performance of a one-hit-wonder rap artist, stumbles into the wrong bathroom, and sees the first hint of zombies before stumbling back into his resort hotel room.
There are four characters the party-goer interacts with during the night, and you get to choose which one to play as in the story: Sam B, the aforementioned one-hit-wonder rap artist, Xian Mei, a Chinese assassin undercover as a resort employee, Logan Carter, a disgraced pro football player, and Purna Jackson, a bodyguard. Each one specializes in their unique form of combat: blunt weapons, sharp weapons, throwable weapons, and firearms, respectively.
I decided to play as Xian because firearms aren’t immediately accessible in the game, I’m not that accurate when it comes to throwable weapons, and I figured sharp weapons could do more damage than blunt ones. Additionally, all of the playable characters are somehow immune to the zombie virus, so you can take damage without worrying about turning.
Gameplay
Dead Island thrusts you into an ever-evolving zombie apocalypse scenario chock full of survivors who need specific supplies and a neverending zombie horde to get through to get to those items. Aiming your weapon at the head does extra damage, and sometimes you’re rewarded with a smooth kill animation if done successfully.
Your weapons are brittle unless you upgrade them, and you can quickly break all your weapons early on in the game if you’re not careful. NPCs in the game pay you for completing tasks for them, and the currency can be used either for repairs/weapon upgrades or buying new weapons entirely. I’d recommend sticking with the weapons you have and upgrading them, as the new weapons are ridiculously expensive for what they are and won’t last long.
If you’re hit by a zombie, your health bar drains. Take enough hits, and you’ll die. In the 7 hours I’ve played the game, I only died two or three times, considering the health kits lying around. There’s a red energy drink called “Energizer” that’s advertised everywhere on Banoi, and cans are littered everywhere on the resort for your player to pick up, chug, and restore health. I found myself chugging enough “Energizer” drinks to cause a heart attack in a blue whale in each mission because they were everywhere, even if I was missing only a sliver of health.
The island looks gorgeous on current-gen consoles; you can tell the developers wanted to focus on the sun, trees, and water of the game. The only issue about it is the massive framerate drops whenever I move. Dead Island came out in 2011 for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 consoles, and the remastered version for current-gen PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles came out in 2016. I played on my PS4 Pro, a console with impressive technical abilities capable of 4K gaming, but the framerate would only stabilize when I was standing still or in an interior environment.
Final Thoughts
There have been games released for the PS3 and Xbox 360 that have stood the test of time. The Portal series, Little Big Planet, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, Left 4 Dead 2, Grand Theft Auto V, and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim are all titles people can come back to and still enjoy or did so well they deserved remastering and rereleasing.
This is not the case with Dead Island.
Killing zombies in the first couple of hours of gameplay never seemed to get old, but they soon became nuisances standing in the way of me collecting supplies for yet another NPC. After about 7 hours of gameplay, I got tired of killing zombies over and over for an endless collection of fetch quests to complete.
When I finally got my hands on a pistol, it did less damage than my upgraded weapon and had a limited number of uses due to the lack of bullets in the game. I can’t imagine those who picked Purna, the firearms expert, will have a good time up until that point.
Fetch quests, while somewhat annoying, are fine when balanced with a variety of other missions in a game. I’d much rather complete fetch quests than participate in the tailing missions characteristic of the Assassin’s Creed series, but if every single quest is a fetch quest, it gets old pretty quickly.
The biggest turnoff of the game, however, was the framerate drops. I’d occasionally miss a swing of my bladed baseball bat at a zombie because the framerate just couldn’t keep up with the gameplay. The framerate drops more than the bodies of the zombies you kill in the game, and that’s saying something considering the sheer amount of zombies on Banoi.
Is Dead Island: Definitive Edition worth it? Not on a console. I’d love to give this game a second chance on a gaming PC where the performance could be optimized, but in its current state, I have no desire to continue playing it.
I wish the best part of this game wasn’t the opening cutscene, but it is. If you’re looking for a fun zombie game, Left 4 Dead 2 holds up well almost eleven years since its launch.
