Dead Island: Best Trailer Ever – It will probably still suck.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for your entire life, you should already know about Dead Island. The zombie game, you know. It’s got the zombies in it… Actually I’m lying. I had never heard of this game before I saw this amazing Trailer today. Watch this, then we’ll talk. It’s OK. I’ll wait.

Doesn’t that make you want to buy this game? Well if that doesn’t, let me tell you what I found out.

Dead Island is a Zombie survival game brought to us by Techland, the Polish company that brought us Call of Juarez and a slew of other games that nobody played. The developer’s objective with Dead Island seems to be every zombie nerd’s wet dream. You’re trapped on a fully explorable island that is completely infested with zombies. You have to escape said zombies using whatever items you can find while using the terrain around you to your advantage. So far we have been promised the ability to customize weapons, Richard Dean Anderson traps for zombies to fall into, bait zombies into devouring much stronger foes, pretty much anything your sick mind can come up with to get your ass off that island alive.

Sounds cool right? I mean, isn’t this what we’ve been waiting for? Left 4 Dead 1 & 2 were both phenomenal zombie games, but lacked real world survival elements as well as creative ways to kill zombies. I know a lot of people really liked Dead Rising, but I absolutely hated it. I think it got a lot more hype than it should have solely because it was a zombie game z0mg! In my opinion, the same functional problems that plagued Dead Rising, GTA, Red Dead Redemption, and the rest, are going to rear their ugly head again.

First of all, zombies are cool as hell in movies because people have a full range of motion and can do simple things like turning their head while running away. Thats where you get those epic heart racing scenes where the hero is trying to force a door full of zombies closed while reaching with his foot to pick up that shotgun that just got knocked to the ground. That just doesn’t happen in games. There is just no good way to do it. The zombie genre does not translate well into the gaming medium. There, I said it.

I know the same can be said for most games, shooters specifically, but thats the main focus of a shooter. To shoot. Zombie survival is not something to be taken lightly, its game companies like Techland that are going to get our children killed when the zombie invasion comes. (Due to lack of preparation.)

Second of all, they keep making claims that while there will be guns, the focus is mainly on melee weapons…

OK. Seriously? Like, really? I get that when you fight zombies, all that you have is what you have. I also get that you’re on vacation and wouldn’t bring your guns to such a lovely island. But I’ll be damned if melee weapons in video games aren’t the most frustrating thing ever. Especially in FPS/TPS. Seriously, how many times do you miss point blank because you started your swing one step too far away, or get hit mid swing because your attack animation hadn’t finished. If it were a movie, or a real life zombie scenario, it would be a completely different story. Yeah yeah, lampshades stop bullets in Counter Strike, invisible walls block your path on the edge of every Serious Sam level, but again, thats not what those game are about.

I’m definitely going to give this a shot, but zombie games (other than L4D) just don’t do it for me. I was able to find some game play footage on YouTube, so you can make your own decision.

Interior Crocodile Alligator!

Check out the Dead Island Facebook page:
http://www.facebook.com/deadislandgame