Previews// Dead Island

Dead Island is the zombie game you have in your head. It's the conversation you've had with your mates down the pub in which you discuss whether you'd be better off grabbing the hedge trimmer or the non-power-reliant cricket bat from the garage in the event of a zombie attack.

It's the next step after reading the Zombie Survival Guide. I like to think it's based on real events the CIA doesn't want us to know about.

Dead Island doesn't make you double-hard like Left 4 Dead or ready-qualified for zombie-fighting like Resident Evil. It doesn't make light of the fact that zombies want to eat your brains, like Dead Rising does. (Zombies trying to eat your brains, contrary to what Simon Pegg and his mates think, is NO LAUGHING MATTER).

Rather, Dead Island chucks you into a scenario in which zombies are on the rampage (or amble, depending on which zombies you encounter) on an island with a believable level of resources and an open map to go at and challenges you to survive. Fortunately, developer Techland has substituted whatever slightly shit town you're from with a tropical island resort.

Having picked your character from a selection of avatars including a throwing expert, firearms expert, sharp weapons expert and blunt weapons expert you wake up in your hotel room (yes, a bit like L4D2) with a hangover.

I opted to go with blunt weapons – the preview code I was playing had a one hour time limit and I figured I wasn't going to come across so many advanced weapons in the first hour of the game.

Having woken up, you stagger out of your room and get accustomed to looking through absolutely everything lying around for stuff and cash. It's a little bit confusing, actually. Picking up cash is straightforward enough, but you seem to be getting charged cash-money for every item you pick up – despite the fact that you're blatantly just nicking it from people's abandoned suitcases.

Anyway, having escaped the hotel with the help of a mysterious voice you find yourself in a beach hut with some other survivors, and you discover how the game's going to go. You're offered a mission by the head lifeguard from the resort whose ass you've just saved and, in the absence of anything else to do except wander aimlessly around the open world environment, you take it.

This is the structure of the game – talk to folk, get missions, complete missions, wander the island of the dead. You should, as you get past the game's opening, get more choice when it comes to missions, but to start with it's made simple for you.

This is also where you find out what fighting zombies is really like in Dead Island. It's hard and a bit frantic. The zombies you're dealing with – at least in the first hour of the game – are slow: until they're not.

You'll come across them innocuously chewing on a corpse and they won't seem that interested in you, then all of a sudden they get a whiff of your juicy brains and come haring towards you. Or else they'll be one of the slow zombies that's scattered about. You just don't know...