I don’t suppose you can expect a *ton* of originality from yet another ‘Zombie Apocalypse’ game:

Dead Island lies somewhere in the middle of the zombie market’s two big darlings: Left 4 Dead and Dead Rising. Like Valve’s masterpiece it’s a first-person adventure with four player coop features.

But instead of making Dead Island a frenetic shooting gallery, Techland’s focused more on desperate survival gameplay by forcing you to scrape together whatever melée weapons you can find.

The weapons break, ala ‘Dead Rising’, and you learn special Anti-Zombie moves by gaining experience, ala ‘Dead Rising’, and… yeah. I’m seeing a lot of derivation here, and I’m not the only one:

Another feature nabbed from Dead Rising, but there’s no harm in borrowing from the best. Once you’ve started levelling up you’ll take on missions that send you deeper into the island.

An interesting definition of ‘the best’. ‘Most offensive’ I might give you, but, ‘the best’? ‘Dead Rising’ sales have always been lower than, say, ‘Resident Evil’ and I think the games struggle to maintain a coherent narrative or tone, usually failing. Really it is a game built around an engine, a sandbox to indulge violence against the Differently Animated without a great deal of depth. Even amongst Anti-Zom games, it’s cotton candy at best.

Cotton candy that tastes like oppression.

I guess we’ll see if this hybrid can dethrone either of its obvious progenitors from their respective thrones when it comes out, however.

Tags: Videogames, Zombie Flavored Creativity Substitute

This entry was posted by John Sears on Tuesday, April 5th, 2011 at 10:11 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.