Dead Island, the highly anticipated zombie game of 2011 designed by Techland. So why is Dead Island a breath of fresh air for zombie fans? And what’s so different about this zombie game? Played one, played them all right?
Dead Island is set on the tropical island of Banoi where a zombie outbreak has occurred and there is no official evidence as to how the virus escaped or started yet. Dead Island will be first person melee, there are a few hints of the game involving around guns from interviews with the developer, though the ammo will be scarce as the location is remote. This will give gamer the sense of rationing and salvaging all that you can. The game is being designed to be a fully four person cooperative online if desired. At the moment there are four main characters that have been announced; Xian Mei, Sam B, Logan and Purna which I will talk about more later.
Techland’s main focus of the game is to create a realistic environment and storyline. Realistic isn’t usually the sort of description you would hear being used to describe a zombie game but it is definitely the future. Techland has developed a zombie system in which there are many different stages of zombie virus including stronger and weaker strands of the disease. This will create a huge variation of enemies forcing you to develop different skills and tactics to survive. As you start your fight for survival on the island, your characters skills will slowly change including the animations of your character. The idea behind it is that you start as just as average civilian and become a zombie-killing machine.
It has been announced that each character will have a different set of defined skills so players will have to work together as a team using each members’ skills to your advantage. In order to give the players a greater sense of survival, Techland has limited rations and it is up to us as the player to find and create new means of defence in a similar way to Dead Rising. Although Techland has already stated that the weapons will be more customizable but less unrealistic. Now after a lot of research into the game the thing that stands out for me and I’m most looking forward to is the map itself. The island is a very large open world map ready to explore that without preparation and planning will result in almost certain death.
To clear up one rumour about child zombies as the official trailer has a little girl that is bitten and thrown out of a window is false, which is a little disappointing in terms of realism as it will seem only adults are on the island. Techland’s main goal with the trailer was to produce a short storyline which plays on the viewers emotion seeing this dead girl slowly reverse in time to see the last few minutes of her life which personally for me sold the game as soon as I saw it I wanted it. Though the trailer doesn’t show us any gameplay footage it gives us an idea of how the zombies will attack that they will function in packs and that they will be relentless in hunting down anyone without the virus. This is how in my eyes it differs from other zombie games where the zombies are mindless.
Dead Island looks very promising adapting from all the best ideas of existing zombie games taking us to the next level of zombie massacre, with such high expectations we can only hope that Techland lives up to the hype.
