7 Things You Should Know About Dead Island

Number 1: The Plot

You awake to find that your vacation has turned into a nightmare. Players are united with other resort guests in a desperate struggle to survive the insatiable appetites of the undead.

The game’s cast quickly discovers they are immune to the disease. They must work together to survive, while also piecing together what has happened.

Number 2: The Setting

Dead Island is set in the Palms Resort. This getaway is found on the fictional Banoi Island, which is depicted as being off the coast of Papua New Guinea.

Here, you are given the freedom to roam around a vast open-world after you have made your way to a lifeguard station. This location serves as your group’s secure base of operations. From there you take on a variety of missions, and these include saving tourists, as well as scavenging food and supplies. Thankfully, you can use vehicles to help you navigate the island and drive over undead speed bumps.

Number 3: The Protagonists

In Dead Island, you can select one of four playable characters, and each has a detailed background and strengths.

The game’s first playable character is Sam B, who is a down and out rap star. After performing at the hotel party on Banoi Island, he awakes with a massive hangover and quickly develops an improvisational method of combat.

Following Sam’s tutorial stages, players can select his companions. These include Xian Mei, who is an incredibly intelligent, fast learning and an employee at the resort, Logan who is an egotistical former NFL star from Texas, and Purina who is a former police officer-turned-VIP bodyguard.

Number 4: Gameplay

This first-person horror-adventure plays a lot like other popular action RPGs, such as Fallout 3 and Borderlands.

This means you play a regular human being who starts off as a sloppy fighter but slowly learns to lob off zombie heads with ease. As such, skill progression occurs through a skill tree and experience system, and this allows you to upgrade your physical abilities and proficiency with weapons. You will earn these upgrades by completing quests.

Number 5: Weapons and Currency

Unlike many other zombie games, the combat focus in Dead Island is on the use of melee weapons, rather than depending on firearms. Sure, guns will become available, but firearms and ammo will be extremely scarce. The focus is on creating weapons from items found in the environment, and this has previously been seen in the iconic zombie game “Dead Rising 2.”

This involves gathering money in order to use a crafting table. There, you can customize your own weapons, such as nail-covered maces. The honor system must have survived the end of the world, as you just leave this money-gathering mechanic on an abandoned workbench while you fight.

When not creating new armaments, players wield items such as boat oars, axes, baseball bats and knives.

Number 6: The Zombies

Dead Island’s innovative use of fully rendered layers of meat and muscle brings zombie mayhem to a new level. This means that enemies have a multi-layered damage system with deeply realistic and gory details. And keeping with convention, damage to the brain remains the best way to take them out for good.

Not only do the zombies of Dead Island come in a variety of forms, but each requires a different combat tactic. These creatures include the limbless and disfigured “Butcher,” “The Thug” which will knock you over, “The Suicider,” which is a large walking corpse with boils all over its body, “The Ram” which wears a straight jacket, and “The Drowner,” which is a corpse covered in slime.

Number 7: Cooperative Play

Easily the most exciting feature of this game is its use of four-player drop in and out co-op online gameplay. This means you can have friends jump in and out of a session at any point to help you complete missions and dismember shambling corpses.

Conclusion:

Developed by Techland and available for the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC; Dead Island is the vacation destination fans of the zombie genre have been waiting for.