Right now im playing Dead Island.
Its a fun game, but with weird bits. I am playing it single player.
Heres a few thoughts about it:
-The melee fighting is very satisfying. Zombies blow up in gore when you hit em right. Melee being satisfying is so damn important guys.
-I loved that you can target specific limbs/spots when you hit em. Its satisfying to bash a bunch of heads in one mighty swipe of a morning star.
-I like how hard it is to come by a firearm in the first few hours of the game. The first time you find a pistol its like WOAH! I can SHOOT at things now! That was pretty cool.
-The game starts out easy, and quickly becomes real hard. Being mobbed by just more than two zombies can get you killed if you arnt careful!
-The weapon modding is nice. Its a cool lil addition.
-The game achieves a good level of immersion. Feels a lot like the first couple hours of playing Fallout 3, you feel like youre scavenging and surviving. I like that sort of feel in a game.
-At first I was thinking the resort island theme would get old pretty quick, but they mix things up a lil a few hours in.
The game is surprisingly difficult after a short while, it can really put you on edge. You really need to pay attention to where youre fighting, pick the right weapon for the right situation, watch your stamina, kick enemies to stagger em instead of just using your weapons...
I wonder though if that may be an unintended consequence of the game being tuned for a multiplayer experience, making the single player difficulty higher than they anticipated. Being alone doesnt just reduce your damage output, it also means all enemies target you at once, and you're more likely to be surrounded! Well, intended or not, I like how hard it is. Keeps you on your toes!
There are some bits of the game that are awkward in single player. In a single player game, you start the game all alone fighting zombies on your own, that sets a very different tone to the game! It makes it scarier, closer to a normal survival horror sort of experience. But then, like two hours in, a first cinematic plays as you get close to a crashed helicopter. The pre-rendered cinematic shows all of the possible playable characters walking together having a kind of buddy cop-ish hostile group dynamic. That was really damn jarring! I had kind of forgotten at that point that the game is a multi-player sort of thing. After that point the cinematics become a bit more common, and every time they play its like, oh right, im not alone im in a group of 5-6 loud, obnoxious people that appear only in cutscenes. Also of course NPCs always refer to me as being a group. Thanks for the help guys! Thank you, everyone! But its just me..... ....
Its not really a gripe with the game, its just a sort of funny consequence to playing the game single player. It really sets a different tone.
The cinematics of the game are pretty weird in general. A lot of them have a sort of forced sentimentality to em with obnoxious sad music... It kind of rubs me the wrong way every time.
There was an annoying moment where a specific action unexpectedly "ended the mission", and so youre like, oh wait no! Im still exploring here! But you cant stop it... A cinematic plays and then you are suddenly teleported outside the place, and cant get back in anymore.
The way the game handles changing weapons can lead to frustration. Sometimes, if you pick up a weapon on the ground, it equips it automatically, and sometimes it doesnt. That is very annoying when you pick up alchool (for some reason considered a weapon), making you take a swig instead of hitting the next zombie with a hammer. Also, if your inventory is full, picking up a weapon exchanges the weapon youre currently holding with the one on the floor. But its not obvious when that happens; You arnt always aware that youve just dropped your favorite melee weapon on the floor! I actually lost some cool weapons forevver because of that.
The game has some taller zombies called "thugs" that are really frustrating to fight in single player. They don't stagger easily, so hitting them with a huge hammer doesnt often keep them from swiping at you. Their arms also seem to have a freakishly long range of attack, so killing them in melee is super tedious. Your own melee range is kind of hard to evaluate to begin with, so you have to inch your way closer, try to swipe once with your weapon and dodge back, which may or may not avoid the monster's counterattack. Every time it hits you, it knocks you on the ground, and your dude takes like 3-4 seconds to get back to his feet. Every fight against these guys is frustrating and irritating! I presume theyre not as bad in multiplayer.
All in all the game's pretty fun, I dont regret buying it. It was like 10-20$ in a Steam sale I think.
Player
