Reviews// Dead Island

We've all dreamt of what it would be like to live in a world of zombies. We've all fantasised about how we would survive, prosper even!

We'd build a community and get down to the thankless, but serious, task of repopulating the planet with a stable of Megan Fox and Roxane Mesquida look-a-likees, while our loser buddies ended up as Zombie snacks, their brains too paltry to be considered a meal.

Of course, everything we learned about surviving in a world of zombies came from the films of George A Romero, set in US shopping malls loaded with sports shops, shelves stacked elephant-eye high with Guns and Ammo. And baseball bats. Abandoned security vans were strategically and fortunately never far away.

Not until Shaun of the Dead, from the fevered imaginations of Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright (who you can just tell, are Gamer Geeks) did we have a blueprint for what the Zombie Apocalypse might really be like; in a country where one might face down the shambling undead armed with, at best, a cricket bat and a pool cue.

Then Danny Boyle gave us another chilling vision of how well we might cope, as he posited a set of brain-eating ne'er do wells which, instead of stumbling along comically, bore down on their prey (that's you!) like a rabid Usain Bolt. With rabies.

The problem is, Zombie-themed video games rarely placed us in a realistic scenario. So, it is a great relief that we finally have Dead Island to put matters right.

Set in a luxury resort, on a holiday island paradise, you play (among others) a washed-out Rap star, one-hit-wonder famous for the annoyingly catchy "Who Do You Voo-Doo, Biatch". Now I am not saying that that is "real life" for most SPOnG readers, but it's certainly chillingly redolent of certain of the staff's workaday routine.

OK, so the setting and pretext of Dead Island maybe a set-up for real life Zombie antics as we may experience them, (once Hell is full, and the dead walk the earth); the gameplay mechanics certainly are.

Instead of being equipped with an infinite-ammo sidearm and a plentiful supply of hastily discarded (but still loaded^*) shotguns, on this dead island you'll have to work with what's laying around the game environment.

You'll also have to get up close and personal to deal with the Zombie curse, because - in the early stages of the game at least - what's laying around are basically planks, broom handles, pipes and oars. And that smacks of real life to me. Because whether you are caught short in Scunthorpe Sainsbury's or Grand Lido Negril, it is unlikely that a plentiful supply of weaponry and ammunition, and a turbocharged armour-plated Hummer, will be to hand.

Unlike some games, but much like real life, if you hit a Zombie (and of course, there are no zombies in real life, but the drunk and glue-sniffing adolescents who frequent our local park are an adequate ersatz) repeatedly round the head with a broom handle, often it is the broom handle that expires first.

Of course, unless you have been involved in an unfortunate meat grinder accident, you probably have more than one hand, and possibly some pockets too. So, Dead Island lets you carry more than one blunt object at a time.


^{*Let's be realistic here. After the Zombie Apocalypse, loaded shotguns will be the cocaine coated iPhone 5's of desirable gadgetry. No one in their right mind would leave one lying around. Instead, you'll have to prize them from the cold dead hands of open-headed and brainless corpses. Or you'll find ones that were frustratingly but unsurprisingly devoid of ammo, their barrels bent and deformed from having been used to bludgeon the undead.}