This preview from Destructoid is useful for gleaning an insight into the upcoming and obviously Anti-Zombie game ‘Dead Island’, whose haunting trailer has already been revealed to have nothing to do with the game itself per se.

Apparently, it focuses heavily on what the designers perceive as realism, but not to the extent that it would get in the way of a cliche/convention or three from the huge library of Videogames that Hate Zombies:

Scattered throughout the shacks and buildings around these areas are blueprints and workbenches, both of which you’ll need to combine weapons for increased damage and awesomeness. Much like in Dead Rising 2, you have the option to combine a baseball bat with a box of nails to create a nail-studded bat. Of course, all of the weapons you find will be in varying shape, so repairing and upgrading them is crucial to doing damage on your opponents. It will cost you cash, though.

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Although Dead Island is being marketed as a heavily melee-focused game, there are a number of ways to go about killing zombies, not all of which involve melee combat. Pulling the left trigger automatically places a target on the nearest zombie. If you’re approaching a group of them, pressing B will activate a special one-time-only skill that does extra damage to mobs. You can throw a weapon at a Suicidal Zombie to kill it before it has a chance to explode near you. Or if you’re like me, you can approach a zombie in the water, pull a bitch move and kick it with the left bumper to give it drowning damage. What’s neat is that the game features manual controls that allow you to slice and dice as you please. The default is automatic, which shows your standard two-second cutscene of a zombie’s head falling off or something equally as gory.

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Overall, I think Dead Island shows promise. Though I was slightly underwhelmed by the clunky controls, I think the game visually looks great and the full storyline (which publishers are keeping under wraps for now) is deep enough to keep you coming back for more. I wasn’t able to demo online co-op mode just yet (the game has no local co-op), but I was told the gameplay would be very similar to that of Left 4 Dead, allowing up to four players, each with their own unique abilities.

So in a nutshell, it has ‘Dead Rising 2′s weapons crafting system, ‘Fallout 3′s miniature cut-scene based combat mechanic, and ‘Left 4 Dead’s co-op play, along with the usual assortment of magical health kits. It also consists largely of running around doing missions to fetch this or that for NPCs, like an MMO.

That’s some ‘realism’ there, right along with the part where you choose where to invest your XP to gain new skills. Which reminds me; I need to invest more my Patience stat at the next level-up.

Anyway, the graphics and gore are apparently outstanding from a technical perspective, and that’s really all that matters, so ‘Dead Island’ seems to be on track to be the next big and shockingly evil Anti-Zombie game on the consoles and PC.

I can’t wait. /snark

Tags: Mainstream Media, Videogames

This entry was posted by John Sears on Wednesday, May 18th, 2011 at 3:00 pm and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.