7/10

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Dead Island AKA Chromatic Aberration Simulator bears the title of "Most heartbreaking negative review I've ever left".

Dead Island feels like an underdeveloped, beta version of Dying Light. Both games were developed by Techland. The problem is that the former is an objectively lesser version of the latter. To say Dying Light blows Dead Island out of the water is an understatement. It might be older, but the similarities they share render Dead Island obsolete, as long as Dying Light exists. We could say Dead Island walked so Dying Light could run, but it didn't even walk, it just slowly crawled and left a mess in its wake.

Dead Island surely feels a lot like Far Cry sometimes, but it's during a zombie apocalypse, on a wealthy resort island. The locations we find ourselves in are surely sights to behold. We go through an amazing resort that surely looks expensive to spend time in. That goes for Act I however. Without wanting to spoil too much, Act II takes place in a shantytown that is basically The Slums from Dying Light, but boring. Act III takes place in a jungle that feels artificial, since there will be no sound effects at all sometimes, taking the player right out of the immersion. Act IV takes place in a prison with repetitive corridors and barely any landmarks. It feels as if the mappers gave up halfway through and rushed the level design. I was fair to them: I groaned and rushed through the last two Acts as well, just wanting the game to end so I could complete it 100%, and out of morbid curiosity. Well, about combat, it has very little depth, but it's surely still satisfying to chop zombie parts off!

Dead Island is full of gaming sins. There's a lot of problems and tedious features included. While not wanting to spoil the story, Act III has an escort mission that has the player escort an NPC walking at a snail's pace, across that act's map, which is ridiculous time padding, and that's just one of the excessive amount of escort missions in the game. There's also RNG when it comes to getting legendary weapons, rendering us no choice but to accept those won't ever drop, unless one takes advantage of an exploit. A zombie type called Thug is the most annoying thing ever: each time it hits, it sends us flying into a nearly 10 second animation of being thrown into the ground and very slowly getting up, which gets old and absolutely tedious after several hours of playtime. Also, shotguns are close to useless, which is just unacceptable, and one of the worst sins in videogames. The writing is also as lively as the zombies themselves: pretty braindead. My Co-op partner said that the chat text box "looks like a litterbox", and I couldn't have described it better.

There's a boring arena mode where little effort was put from the developers. There's also moments where we respawn in inconvenient places, or way too far behind from our objective. There's a ton of fetch quests that have no creativity put into them, and some are even copy pasted from previous acts. The skill tree system might as well be a linear and direct progression at each level up, since it's obvious which skills are the ones meant to be game changing, and the lesser ones are way too terrible to pick, making it very one dimensional. The only way to truly change your playstyle is by picking another character, which isn't bad in itself, but then what's the point in having a skill tree in the first place?

Dead Island is pretty fun with friends, and I've had moments of laughter with my friend that left me out of breath, but so is any other co-op game. Anything is fun with friends, even if it's a janky and glitchy mess like this, full of uninteresting fetch quests and terrible writing. So much so, that I stopped taking the game seriously way back in Act I, and couldn't help but point fingers and laugh at certain aspects. Dead Island gets increasingly weaker in terms of quality as one progresses for sure, and the absurd amount of jank one encounters is out of this world.

I'm off to play Dead Island Riptide. Ughh.

very buggy, story not good, voice acting subpar at best