Reviews// Dead Island

In fact your in-game pockets are not dissimilar to those of the mythical Pete (go look it up, whippersnappers) (or don’t, he’s here. Ed) so you can carry an almost unlimited amount of objects, things, stuff; plus there's assorted bric-a-brac that you find laying around Club Med, or whatever hotel hell it is you are in.

When I say lying around, it is true that some of these things are just there, scattered on the sidewalk, or abandoned on the beach. Others though, are carefully stored in the discarded luggage of the now (un)dead. Others still are locked in the lockers of the now brain-hungry hotel staff.

As you progress around the resort, it's up to you to loot and pillage anything that you can to get cash and goodies that will come in useful later.

Oh, the dead! Rape them for cash too. Don't feel guilty, until you stoved their crania in they were hell bent on opening yours and feasting on lovely medulla oblongata with a side of cerebellum.

You are not, of course, the only survivor on Zombie Love Island. There are various and sundry others. These include a goodly smattering of foxy girls in bikinis (so THAT's why it's set on a tropical island!)

Now clearly, trapped in a Zombie infested paradise with a ton of totty the logical thing to do would be to fuck one and other's brains out - thus making you less appetizing to zombies. Unfortunately, the game does not avail this option to you.

What it does avail instead is a mission-based game mechanic with survival horror and RPG elements. You wander round the island where you meet "Objective Givers" - basically other survivors - who have a need, and you are the one to fulfil that need.

That seems a little unfair, you may be thinking. But there is one salient fact that I seem to have omitted to mention thus far. You, and only you, appear to be immune to the Zombie plague.

So, if you get gnawed on a little, instead of turning into a brain-on-toast devotee, you just take a hit to your health, which can easily be overcome with a shot of energy drink. Take too many hits and not enough drinks and you'll die but you will re-spawn at a recent save point to carry on your Zombie-bashing mission.

I mentioned that there are survival horror elements to the game, and there are, in that your weapons are expendable - so you'll need to drop them as they become useless and swap to one of the others you are carrying, or pick up something laying around.

As you kill Zombies, you amass experience points and often cash too. The cash can be used at work-benches to repair, upgrade or modify your weapons. To perform a mod, you'll have to have found or won the modification plans, and have collected the required constituent parts.

Weapons are never in terribly short supply, but neither are they laying around here there and everywhere, so some strategy is required to prevent you getting caught in a Zombie crowd with nothing but your fists and your feet.

Despite what the Zombie Survival Guide and Day of the Dead tell us, these Zombies can use tools. And they will come at you with weapons. Getting caught with nothing but your fist can result in an untimely demise, though you do have the trusty and surprisingly effective "kick" to fall back on too when you find yourself without a weapon.

Later in the game, you'll be able to combine items you've found with weapons you've collected to create new, better weapons and incendiary devices. These are particularly effective on Zombies, who seem to burn like dry kindling. Later still, you'll graduate to ranged weapons.

The RPG elements of the game come in the form of its XP and level-up system. When you collect enough eXperience Points you can go to the Skills Screen and decide which of your attributes you want to level up. In terms of skills: there is Fury, there is Combat and there is Survival.
Combat and Survival, as you may expect, increase the damage your weapons do, and decrease the damage you take - or they convert it into stamina.

The Fury menu is a little less obvious. In fact, despite playing for many hours, I am still unsure of what Fury does and how to use it. There may have been a solitary explanation that I [A]-Buttoned hastily past at the start of the game - but once I came to care there was no help to tell me what Fury was or how to use it. Which was quite frustrating.