This post is more out of curiosity than anything, but it’s not like there’s been any noteworthy news this week. (Or maybe there has, I’ve been pretty busy with the first week of school.) Out of the seven million games that dropped on Tuesday, I only picked up Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine, mostly because my money is very tight and I wanted to support a developer I respect (Relic Entertainment out of Vancouver). Other than Resistance 3, the other big ticket item from Tuesday’s buffet was Dead Island and I’ve been seeing all sorts of interesting tidbits regarding the game and its post-launch state.
You may have heard about the craziness with the PC version, which was released into the wild as the developer build instead of one suitable for public consumption and all the funny videos that went along with that. I’ve been watching some walkthroughs of the game and while it does look very rough in some parts, it appears to be a sort of Borderlands/Left 4 Dead crossover. The fact that this sort of game has co-op makes it a very appealing prospect, so I’m wondering if any of you guys picked it up.
So, if you’re playing Dead Island, I have a couple questions for you: is the game any fun? What system did you get it on? What are some things you love and some things you hate? Buy it, rent it, or wait for a Steam sale?
I’ve bought it for the 360. I’m probably only about 6 hours in, leveled up my “Purna” to about 9-10, as I remember.
The interface is “Borderlands”, almost cribbed completely, with a “tourist brochure” skin over it. I’m not going to say that as a negative, since it’s user-friendly.
Now, I’m guessing what you want to hear first-off is combat, and combat is as amazing as advertized. Yeah, it’s nothing like “walking meat blender Chuck Greene” or the action-horror antics of L4D2, but the “zombie fencing” is always enjoyable. Zombies react realistically to being struck with different weapons, and there’s a little endorphin rush when the action slows down to show a perfect strike, cleaning cutting a head off.
The penalty for death is at best trivial, death just forces you to wait 5 seconds, lose a small fraction of your cash(barely useful until you start making custom weapons) and then teleports you to the most recent checkpoint, which is often literally less than three seconds away from where you died.
However, this doesn’t make the game any less unnerving. The visuals are gorgeous(which contrasts with the off-model visuals of uninfected humans and Uncanny Valley animations when you’re playing co-op and watching another player), and it makes the eerie quiet that much more disturbing. And then your heart jumps when you hear a growl coming from that corpse you just walked over or the howl of half a dozen sprinters hidden in the bushes.
I’d say, while it’s not the most dramatically compelling and the bugs are almost as bad as New Vegas’s initial release(I had to do some crazy stuff to get one plot-important mission to advance), it’s still worth experiencing.
So far I have enjoyed the game quite a bit, I got it for pc.
Just a quick fyi for anyone who hasn’t bought it yet, if you buy it on amazon, you can get it for 39.99 instead of the 49.99 on steam, and when you install it, it installs on to your steam account. So you get the same exact thing that you would through steam, associated with your steam account and such, for 10 dollars cheaper.
I would enjoy playing with you Mitch if your interested, I think I have you on my steam, my current screen name is “Bandito”. I’ve only played for about an hour and a half, so I’m pretty new to the game.
Look me up some time.
Looks like Dead Island is kewl, but I’m gonna wait for the price to go down, and maybe a bug patch would be nice. I’m not itching to play it, so I wanna spend my money wisely.
I actually got Dead Island a couple days ago. It’s exponentially more fun in co-op, so any people on my Steam friend`s list, let`s get a game going!
A couple of my friends and I are planing on starting new characters tomorrow morning, and slowly going through the game from the start together over the next few weeks, we still have one empty slot, we are playing at around 10:30 AM tomorrow central time. Look me up around that time tomorrow if your interested. (we could run into potential issues tomorrow, one of the guys is actually deployed in the middle east, but still able to play on his laptop, but we aren’t sure what his connection will be like.) -Bandito