February 26, 2012

Find An Energy Drink On The Ground, Drink It Quickly.

Let’s see, what do I still need to write about…
Oh, right. Dead Island.

I did not like Dead Island.

I picked the gun lady because I’m like “how could this possibly work without making you get a lot of guns early on?” And basically, it doesn’t. As the gun lady, you don’t really have any gun skills until like half the way down your skill tree. You’re doing the same melee and throwing shit as the other characters, only you’re probably a bit worse at it. You walk around and zombies run up and you smack them with objects until they break, and then you pick up new objects. You can hold a lot of weapons, but only equip two at a time, so at least in the early game, you have to go into the menu to equip something new constantly. This is genius. (Not really.) I’d be okay with the equipment limit in a game where two weapons would be things you’d use for more than 3 enemies and you’re just having less options, and I guess eventually the game gets to that point? But certainly not at the beginning. It’s frustrating and stupid.

But yeah, the zombies run up at you, and you attack them all the same way, and then your weapon breaks and you grab another weapon and then a zombie runs up and you do it again. This is boring, and really frustrating when you get to a zombie who is “special,” because you’d think “Oh, I need to use different tactics!” but you can’t, really. That’s your options. If you want to do significant damage, you need to run up at him and hit him, but now you’re being punished for it. Genius. I turned on the “analog” combat, since I heard that was more fun, but that doesn’t really help much. It feels different, sure, but I, in a lot of ways, felt like I had LESS control over what I was doing. It felt like I was doing what I’d actually do if I tried to fight someone with an oar or pipe: flail wildly. I’m supposed to be some badass security guard, according to my little bio, but I’m flailing about and screaming while I fight people. I don’t feel badass at all. That seems, in a lot of ways, like a problem in a supposedly loot-driven game like this. I dunno. Certainly not what I expect in a game where you’re supposed to run around with 3 other people.

The missions were fetch quests, and I tired quickly of the combat, and then I realized that people say this first part of the game is the best part! And I am hating it! So I sent it back to Gamefly. Good try, Dead Island! But yeah, I just wasn’t feeling it. At all.

I reserve a special kind of scorn for fake Australians. The gun lady’s certainly one of those.

Comment by Merus — February 26, 2012 @ 8:42 am

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