Dead Island Reviews
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The A.V. Club, B-.
Narratively, Dead Island is unambitious. There's no attempt at satire, commentary, or quirk. The plot, mostly communicated through quest-givers, is straight-faced as a straight-to-cable horror flick, but like the rest of the game, it's serviceable. Sometimes getting the dead to walk and giving players the tools to stop them is all it takes. All those ragged edges, byproducts of a sloppy sewing job, get lost in the blood.
PC Authority, scoreless.
Missions are poorly explained, save games forget where your vehicle is and there are dumb design decisions such as slapping a huge pipeline in front of a vital ladder.
And yet Dead Island sucks us in. It's scrappy and reeks of wasted potential, but its cheesy grindhouse fun packs in so much it's hard to resist going back to see what lies around the next corner.
Neowin, 7/10.
If Techland decides to make a sequel to this zombie game, I just hope they improve upon what they had and make it even more enjoyable. Fix these issues and you would have a fantastic zombie game, but as it stands we have just a (good) one.
The Sidney Morning Herald, 8/10.
Dead Island is a must for any fan of zombie entertainment. It combines a serious take on an apocalyptic situation with some very non-serious zombie-splattering. Combined with the co-op and the atmospheric setting, it could be the closest thing to Dawn of the Dead: The Game that we're ever likely to see.
The Sixth Axis, 7/10.
Dead Island is what you make of it. Sure, it might not be the game we were originally promised, but it's still a lot of fun. The sheer scale of the island alone is an impressive accomplishment. There's so much to explore, so many secrets to discover, and even more zombies to decapitate. There is no doubt that Dead Island is a good game once you look past all the glitches. It's just a shame that Techland didn't have more time to polish things up before its release.
