Welcome to Dead Island
Isn't it time we got up close and personal with zombies again?
When the axe sinks into rotten flesh, it buries deep, spraying gore with its impact. The blow cripples the shambling beast, buying precious seconds. But the strike, like its predecessors, is also costly. Repeated contact with ligament and bone has blunted the scavenged weapon. It will need repair soon, and if none can be made, it will be tossed aside in favor of something shiny and new.
This is the brutal combat of Dead Island, a world overrun by infected humans. They're aggressive beasties with superhuman strength and a taste for the red stuff. Like other zombie games (and there are many), the players are the last holdouts against the tide of a shuffling undead mob. And while it would be convenient to provide them with a magical room full of firearms with which to dispatch the problem, the makers of Dead Island have settled on a different approach.
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Dead Island Teaser Trailer. Watch it. Then Watch it Again.
The Royal Palms Resort is perched on the remote island of Banoi in Papua New Guinea. It's a tropical paradise turned tourist magnet, remote and exotic. Not the sort of place you'd expect to find scattered caches of weapons, boxes of grenades, rocket launchers leaning against walls, and mounted machine guns. In an effort to preserve that reality, Techland, the developers of Dead Island, have stripped those handy gaming conventions away, leaving a stark reality in their place.
Rather than run-and-gun their way through a meat maze, players will be forced to scavenge for objects and use them to beat their undead foes into submission. There are precious few firearms scattered around the island (and even less ammo), so the majority of the combat will be intimate. Knives, machetes, bats, broomsticks, pipes – these are your defenses against the horde of infected monsters. It's survival horror with a melee action twist, and it's disgusting.
![[IMG]](http://xbox360media.ign.com/xbox360/image/article/115/1150368/dead-island-20110215055247850.jpg)
Start choppin'.
Publisher Deep Silver and developer Techland recently showed me an early build of Dead Island, and the zombies were horrifying in their varying states of decay. With each blow, their already sloughing flesh fell away in sprays of blood, revealing layers of muscle underneath. The publisher describes Dead Island as dark, twisted and gritty, and the tiny sliver I've seen seems to support those claims. This is not the campy world of Dead Rising.
Dead Island's developers call it a "first-person zombie-slasher/action-RPG." That's a mouthful, and it's still unclear what the balance will be among those descriptors. Players will be able to choose from a cast of pre-set characters, including a former rapper named Sam B (the only character revealed so far).
If you have any doubt about how serious the Techland developers are about the setting and storyline they've created, watch the chilling Dead Island trailer. We watch a lot of video game trailers at IGN, but few cause crowds of editors to gather and watch in silence. This was one of the exceptions.
The player is cast as a guest vacationing at the posh hotel. When the zombie outbreak occurs, he and a handful of other guests remain uninfected. They set out on a mission to escape the island, but along the way, they'll uncover the secret behind the mysterious outbreak. Although Dead Island is a story-based experience, it's built for co-operative play, and Deep Silver says up to four gamers can drop in and out of the game seamlessly. But if you don't want to play with friends, you can also play through the game alone.
Although the player starts out as a simple tourist with minimal zombie-killing skills, his traits will improve along the way, thanks to a mini role-playing system built into the game. Although Deep Silver isn't spilling all the details yet, we know there will be a leveling system and a skill tree. As the player progresses, his stats will increase and he'll gain access to new combat abilities and animations.
![[IMG]](http://xbox360media.ign.com/xbox360/image/article/115/1150368/dead-island-20110215055248475.jpg)
Beautiful. In a horrible, zombie-ish sort of way.
If Dead Island sounds familiar to you, then you have a good memory. It was originally announced in 2007, but no publisher was officially attached. Techland worked on other projects in the years since, but Dead Island was slowly shuffling along in the background. Now, Deep Silver is on board, and the game seems likely to see the light of day. It's scheduled for a 2011 release on Xbox 360, PC and PS3, but no specific dates have been revealed yet.
Dead Island's concept is striking. Place players on a tropical island; surround them with zombies of varying shapes, sizes, speeds and abilities; place only found objects at their disposal; degrade their weapons over time; and set the whole adventure against a backdrop of mystery and drama. But will a first-person melee combat action game with RPG elements really work?
I've seen so little of Dead Island that it's impossible to make that call yet. The idea of an all-melee zombie game is great on paper, but when the baseball bat hits the bone, will it be exciting enough to sustain an entire game experience?
Will the constant hand-to-hand combat wear thin, or will the collectibles, storylines, environments and tense moments make up the difference?
I'm hoping to see a lot more from Dead Island in the months to come. I've been following its development for years now, and it should be fascinating to see how it turns out. Regardless, it's great to see a developer taking the zombie genre in an entirely new direction. Here's hoping the folks at Techland and Deep Silver are as good at making games as they are at making trailers.
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