Dead Island opens on a lie. The Royal Palms Resort on the fictional South Pacific island of Banoi is a luxury getaway, the kind of place built for people with money to burn. Then the outbreak hits, the guests turn, and Techland’s 2011 action role-playing game asks you to survive a paradise that has already died. It is one of the more striking setups of its console generation. The paper’s verdict is that the game never quite lives up to that first impression — a judgement, not a finding.
Trailer, via IGDBcom.
The Dead Child in the Trailer
Dead Island was announced at the 2006 Electronic Entertainment Expo, then delayed until 2011. In that gap, its cinematic announcement trailer did an enormous amount of work. The trailer drew controversy for its depiction of a dead child. It also drew praise for its emotional impact and animation, and it is still held up as one of the best trailers in any medium.
That reception set an expectation the finished game could not meet. The game that finally shipped in September 2011 in North America and Europe, and in October in Japan, was not the game the trailer promised.
Four Survivors and a Melee Focus
The plot follows four playable survivors who turn out to be immune to zombification. They are rapper Sam B., hotel receptionist and Hong Kong government spy Xian Mei, former American football star Logan Carter, and ex-detective turned bodyguard Purna Jackson. A voice on the emergency intercom wakes them after a party and sends them out of the hotel. Lifeguard John Sinamoi rescues them, then tasks them with finding supplies and contacting the outside world.
The four travel to the city of Moresby with Jin, the daughter of a bitten mechanic who armors a car for the escape. In Moresby they fight a special infected called the Ram, aid a holdout at a barricaded church, and raid a supermarket held by Raskol gangs. Jin is captured and raped by a Raskol faction at an abandoned police station. The survivors kill the gang and rescue her, but her actions anger Sam and Logan.
A Skill Tree and a Worn-Out Blade
Dead Island is played from a first-person perspective across an open world split into relatively large areas. Combat is the spine of it, and melee weapons are the emphasis to the point that firearms do not appear until the second half of the game. You earn XP by completing tasks and killing enemies. Each level-up grants health and one skill point to invest in a skill tree.
Weapons are randomly generated and also placed in set locations or found on enemies. They carry stats tied to your current level, can be upgraded three times, and most can be modded from a blueprint to add features like nails, electrified blades or poison. They wear out. A weapon damaged past a certain point becomes much more expensive to repair. A stamina bar forces you to stop after running, jumping or swinging, and fighting a high-level zombie will often drain it and get you killed.
What the Glitches Cost
The pre-release acclaim did not carry over. Dead Island received generally lukewarm reviews. Its atmosphere, gameplay and playable characters earned praise. Large technical difficulties and in-game glitches, the graphics, and most notably the absence of the emotional themes from the trailer drew criticism. It sold over 5 million units by February 2013 anyway.
The follow-ups kept coming in a fixed order.
- Dead Island: Riptide, a standalone expansion, arrived in 2013.
- Escape Dead Island, a spin-off, came out on 18 November 2014.
- Dead Island 2 was set for 2015, was delayed, and finally released on April 21, 2023.
A Paradise That Never Quite Lands
The trailer is the thing people remember, and that is the problem. A trailer can be a short, controlled piece of animation. A game has to sustain that feeling for dozens of hours, and this one cannot.
The glitches and the graphics are not cosmetic complaints. They break the mood the game needs to function, and the emotional themes that made the trailer land are not in the finished product.
The melee system is the part worth defending. Making firearms scarce for half the game forces you into close, ugly fights with weapons that break, and the stamina bar means you cannot simply swing your way out. That is a real design idea, and it works more often than the rest of the game does. The weapon mods, the skill tree and the level-scaled loot give it a spine the story lacks.
But a good idea executed in a broken frame is still a broken frame. The paper’s view is that Dead Island opens stronger than it finishes, and the distance between those two points is the story of the game.
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