Metascore

Mixed or average reviews - based on 75 Critics What's this?

User Score

Mixed or average reviews- based on 490 Ratings

  • Summary: A couple flying to the vacation of their dreams is torn apart by a violent plane crash. Take on a harrowing quest to find your lost wife. Enter into the dark world of a devastated tropical paradise now plunged into chaos. It's a place where the word "dead" has an entirely new meaning. Face the nightmare and fight for survival. Explore the secrets hidden in the darkest regions of the island and fight your way through. Survival is your main goal! Dead Island is a non-linear FPP (First Person Perspective) survival horror title. The ultra-realistic combat system will ensure that every confrontation is a thrilling experience. Use anything you find in your surroundings as a weapon. Make decisions that influence the entire world around you. Take advantage of opponent behavior and game physics. Dead Island is a mix of intense action and chilling horror environments in an engaging, strikingly realistic story. [Techland] Expand
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 38 out of 75
  2. Negative: 1 out of 75
  1. Mar 1, 2012
    93
    Dead Island is a hell of a ride from start to (near) finish and is a zombie game that stands out from the rest of the pack.
  2. Nov 23, 2011
    85
    I admit that I was not expecting much from Dead Island, given the oversaturated subject matter and the delayed development time. And while the game definitely has its share of weaknesses, it is pleasantly surprising in its own right.
  3. 72
    The RPG twist on the genre is fairly cool, and does result in an experience that is longer than you might expect, but the game's utter lack of story and reliance on pre-established genre conventions make it a pretty big missed opportunity.
  4. Sep 6, 2011
    30
    The world doesn't have the charm to warrant forgiveness, and progress-halting bugs prevent it anyway. With regular AI freezes and vanishing items, a mistimed autosave can prove fatal. Ultimately it all invites the refashioning of another line from Romero. When there's no more room in development hell, the dead losses will walk the Earth.

See all 75 Critic Reviews

Score distribution:
  1. Negative: 30 out of 201
  1. You can see an entire walkthrough of the game here:http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL19C772559E876B8E&feature=viewall

    Perfect hybrid of
    Dead Rising, Left 4 Dead and Borderlands(a little bit of Fallout as well). Leveling up with a skill tree, scavenging and looting, weapon mods, melee madness, guns and explosives, co-op, and a long single player experience makes this one of the best zombie games ever. However one of the best things about this game is probably the difficulty. The game starts out pretty easy but as you level up so do the zombies. As you progress through the game you encounter stronger types of zombies that are pretty difficult to take down. The game even warns you that certain areas of the island are very dangerous to traverse alone bringing the emphasis on playing the game in co-op.

    This is the true zombie survival horror game that we have all been waiting for. The promise of death in a few seconds in the event of a zombie encounter adds to the atmosphere and the realization of the ever impending doom of the zombie apocalypse. Anxiety and fear take over as you traverse the city where you are severely outnumbered around every corner and your best chance of survival is to just run. However you cannot always escape because you must manage your stamina. Using too much of it to run away from encounters will get you winded and in the event that you get cornered, not being able to defend yourself will provide you with a quick death. Having said that the combat in the game is exceptional. Mostly relying on melee weapons, it adds a great mechanic into the mix: being able to sever or break limbs to cripple the enemy. This alone adds a skill gap to the combat system that rewards accuracy and tactical thinking.

    All in all it is a great game that has a relatively long single player experience that can be shared with 3 other players online. You will die a lot in this game and that just makes it that much better because it adds to the atmosphere of the zombie apocalypse. This is one game where you are rewarded for your skills in combat as well as tactical thinking otherwise you're "dead meat".
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  2. Pros: Great graphics, great controls, great default difficulty level (due to swarming, weapons breaking)
    Cons: single player = hard as balls,
    penalty for death isn't great enough, nor is the death respawn

    At first I hated the weapons dulling and breaking aspect, but as I played further I realized that it made the game fun. You have to understand that this game is NOT like other games in aspect of killing everything that you see. There are times when fleeing > fighting and that is exactly what makes this game incredible. If you are the type of gamer that's run and gun > strategy then this game isn't for you.
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  3. This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. The thing with Dead Island is, it starts of very enticing, you want to carry on playing and find out, 'How did this happen?' 'Why am I immune to this disease?' But the more you go through the game, the more you can actually live without knowing. It has a very repetitive style, NPC always asking for something. It's fetch this and fetch that, and halfway through the game you are just feel like saying, 'Go do it yourself!' And the ending left me very disappointed, the cure turning Ryder White into a zombie, oh please! Although admittedly the whole gameplay is very unique and nothing iv seen in a zombie game before, mainly melee combat based to make the game more tricky, but then I wasn't even afraid of dying because you lose some money and then are respawned in exactly the same place, or in some cases at your actual location your going too! Overall its good for about the 1st act before you realise the repetitiveness of it all, combat can be very fun, but sometimes very challenging if you are playing single player rather than multiplayer as you are overwhelmed with zombie (Especially at the church area) but still don't worry, you only lose money! The NPC as well as the PC's are very bland and you don't connect with them, I really couldn't have cared less if they would have all died in the end! (To be honest it would have been a better ending!) The scenery in this game is just amazing and it is fun just to sometimes take time out of doing repetitive quests and just explore the open world! Expand
  4. I wanted to like this game, I REALLY wanted to LOVE this game. I tried, but I couldn't. With a game breaking weapon break system, horrible release version full of glitches, patches that caused more issues than they fixed, and "Pre-Order DLC" that still hasn't been released (it was announced today to finally come out on November 22nd, months after release) I can say that when I traded this game in, the 25 dollars I got back were a sore disappointment. A game with huge potential that got horribly mishandled by what seems to be a fledgling developer may have been the nail in their coffin for me. Expand

See all 201 User Reviews

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