Dead Island EP 3: They’re Massacring Me!

By Shamus Posted Friday May 15, 2015

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 139 comments


Link (YouTube)

On Metacritic, The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct (which we covered last week) has 38 on metacritic while Dead Island has a score of 80The scores are closer if we go by user reviews, with scores of 2.5 and 6.8, respectively.. This makes no sense to me. Both are mechanically confused and unpolished games about fighting zombies. Is the knife-execution move of Survival Instinct really that much dumber than the high-kick of Dead Island? Don’t they both have about the same desultory approach to dialog and “story”? They both have the same energy drink = healing idea. Both have glitchy unpolished art, although I concede that Dead Island looks technically superior even if it’s artistically on about the same level.

I’m not saying the two games are equal. I’m just curious as to why Dead Island is rated so much higher. And I’m not just talking about review scores. Dead Island was given a larger spotlight, more favorable reviews, and was a current story for longer after release, while Survival Instinct was a passing joke.

Is it because the eye-grabbing trailer give us journalists something to talk about? Is it because Dead Island has more modern graphics? Is it because Survival Instinct is a licensed game and nobody takes those seriously anyway?

 

Footnotes:

[1] The scores are closer if we go by user reviews, with scores of 2.5 and 6.8, respectively.



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139 thoughts on “Dead Island EP 3: They’re Massacring Me!

  1. Sougo says:

    I think the different reception between the two game is that everyone expect Survival Instinct to be a cheap/lazy cash-in junk like any other movie/tv shows adaptation games. Meanwhile, Dead Island have the illusion of a AAA game so people are more charitable to it.

    1. MichaelGC says:

      I guess there’s also the shadow of the Telltale Walking Dead game looming over Survival Instinct, even though those appear to only really share the name and the setting.

      But it seems that the main reason is that lots of folks just really like Dead Island, unlike WD:SI – Gamespy call it “a masterpiece,” and Josh Viel said it was: “better than Fallout 3.” So, mainly mileages and the natural variance thereof, I’d guess: looking closer at the user reviews, 9 people liked WD:SI, but 225 people liked DI: obviously a huuuuuge difference when it comes to this sort of thing.

      1. Thomas says:

        % wise the difference is huge too, most of the users reviews for Dead Island are positive and most of the user reviews for Survival Instinct are negative

      2. Daemian Lucifer says:

        Theres also the factor that dead island came earlier,at a time when we werent quite as sick of the zombie games as we were when walking dead came out.

      3. Michael says:

        With TWD it’s not even really the same setting. It’s kind of the same in that they’re both zombie apocalypses, but the TV series (and Survivor Instincts) goes in a completely different direction from the comics (and Telltale games). Though, granted, I’m not familiar enough with the TV series to go into any detail there.

        1. Thomas says:

          I don’t think they’re really so different as to make much of the changes though.

          There’s nothing about survival instinct which connects it with The Walking Dead franchise at all except the main character, and that’s worse than nothing because it’s one of those cruddy licensed game prequel stories where it’s painfully fan fiction.

          1. Michael says:

            At a tonal level, the impression I’ve gotten from the TV series was, “melodrama with decomposing participants wandering through the background occasionally.” With the comics, it was “bleak to the point of absolute, unrelenting, hopelessness. Every status quo is a temporary reprieve from a horrible slide into some new kind of hell.”

            I mean, I stopped reading after the Prison, when everyone except Rick and Shane were killed. Rick was down a hand, and had suffered a gut wound that was infected.

            In a way, the comics are kind of brilliant. Kirkman was going for a zombie movie that never ends, and the comics nail that. With all of those false escape cliffhangers leading into actual stories, instead of cheap “gotchas” to close out a film.

            I’ve never gotten that impression off the TV series. Granted, a lot of my experience with the TV series has been second hand. When it originally released, I made a mental note to watch it, but then had friends who knew I read the comic coming back to me with questions… and a growing sense of, “WTF?” that killed my interest in actually watching it.

            Maybe that’s unfair of me.

            Survival Instincts… so much as it’s anything, reminds me of the much more sanitary setting of the TV series. While the Telltale games remind me a lot more of the, “and then it gets worse from here,” refrain from the comics.

    2. Groboclown says:

      Isn’t it more like that games “journalists” can’t give AAA games a lower than an 85 mark? Maybe I don’t understand these meta-critic rankings, but I thought that a AAA with an 85 meant that it wasn’t worth using as a diaper trash bag.

      1. silver Harloe says:

        “The Critic: The Pilot (#1.1)” (1994)
        Duke Phillips: Why the hell do you have to be so critical?
        Jay Sherman: I’m a critic!
        Duke Phillips: No, your job is to rate movies on a scale from “good” to excellent.”
        Jay Sherman: What if I don’t like them?
        Duke Phillips: That’s what “good”‘s for.

        I think the same goes for game critics, sadly enough.

        1. Michael says:

          Man, I loved that show. It was so freakin’ sharp.

      2. Sougo says:

        Yeah, that’s what I was alluding to when I said people are more ‘charitable’ to it. AAA Review scores are so inflated that it’s borderline useless at this point.

  2. Thomas says:

    I think Dead Island feels more ‘finished’ even if the finished product isn’t very good. Also Survival Instinct was naturally compared to Telltale’s The Walking Dead and it’s going to look like the laziest piece of rubbish compared to that.

    Whereas Dead Island is competing with games like Dead Rising, and whilst its going to look like a cheap knock-off in comparison (which is what most of the reviews went with), it’s more of a budget game knock-off. The PS2 game which no-one talked about but some people played and got time out of.

    As well as that, there are areas where you compare the two games and Dead Island comes off better. We didn’t play long enough to see it, but Survival Instinct makes you repeat the exact same maps ad nauseum, but maybe entering through a different door. In a game as short as Survival Instinct that’s a killer. In Dead Island each level is at least it’s own level mostly.

    Dead Island also has a functional co-op mode right? So at least you might pull it out to play with a friend. There’s no reason to play Survival Instinct

    I’m surprised it hit as high as 80 though. This seems like the definition of a 70 to me.
    —————————-

    Also personally, the tropical setting does make a huge difference. I’d hate to be forced to spend time in any of the areas in Survival Instinct, never mind play them again and again and again and again.

    In Dead Island at least you can enjoy the colours and the view even if the game sucks.

    1. Thomas says:

      Actually I reckon I can explain it now:

      In videogame score terms, Dead Island is a game that almost no reviewers would give lower than a 6/10. Because the gameplay isn’t very fun but it works technically, there’s no clear obvious points where it’s not finished and it looks okay. So most people give it 6’s and 7’s, but every now and then some reviewer really likes it for some reason and gives it an 8 or 9, pulling the average up.

      Whereas Survival Instinct had problems with crashes and frame rate drops. There are mechanics in the game that literally don’t work. In fact the main mechanic of the game the ‘survival’ part doesn’t work because if you run out of supplies it just makes you repeat a map yet again. And it looks like they took stock assets and did nothing with them.

      That makes videogame reviewers feel like they can drop below 6/10, and because they rarely get to do this, and Survival Instinct compares so badly to The Walking Dead, it represents everything wrong with licensed game, so some reviewers smash it and give it 1’s and 2’s.

      —————————————–
      This probably is where videogame reviews genuinely are broken. I’ve got nothing against a 6-10 system. I’m not going to complain an arbitrary scale isn’t scaled to some other arbitrary scale I think it should be.

      But I think videogame reviewers are terrible at realising that some functional games just aren’t worth playing and the reviews don’t link things like Dead Island to the same sort of experience as Survival Instinct.

      1. MichaelGC says:

        This may also have been a factor: there was a “WTF Is…” of Survival Instinct posted on March 20, 2013. All of the Metacritic reviews were published after that date. So, given the popularity of WTF, that may have helped ‘set the tone’ for the later written reviews. (There wasn’t a WTF of Dead Island.)

        1. Michael says:

          That might be giving TB more credit than due for his ability to “shape the message.” He’s certainly influential, but saying he was the reason that “this cheap cash in game was reviewed badly” and that game over there that now feels horribly dated didn’t get savaged seems a little excessive.

          1. MichaelGC says:

            Yes, that’s why I said it may also have been a factor.

    2. Ledel says:

      I don’t know if you can say that TWD:SI lost points because it was compared to TellTale’s The Walking Dead. The two games were going for entirely different tones, and they were very upfront about that fact. It would be similar to saying that Inglorious Basterds has a lower IMDB score because Saving Private Ryan was a better World War 2 movie.

      1. MichaelGC says:

        Aye, but saying that they probably were compared is not to say that they should have been (and indeed, they really shouldn’t have been from what I can tell). The comparison may not even have been consciously explicit, but if any random Thing X shares a name with Thing Y then (rightly or wrongly) that’ll have a significant psychological impact, most of the time.

      2. TheGreyPotter says:

        It certainly is unfair to compare the two, but it probably couldn’t have been helped. Both were based on the same licence, both were released fairly close together, and TellTale’s TWD was a mega-hit that was still on a lot of people’s minds. Some reviewers would feel obligated to at least point out that they’re very different, to try and curb people away from expecting another TT game. And if you’ve already mentioned the TT game, then it’s incredibly easy to compare and contrast from there.

      3. Thomas says:

        If you read the reviews half of them start with “Telltale’s The Walking Dead showed us how licensed games are meant to be”

        Sure, the genre’s are different, but you have to remember that neither developer started with the genre. They were given a licensed property and told to make a game out of that property. One of them was given time and money and created a unique experience better than some of its source material. The other was given neither and created a fairly generic product who at its best is only aping the source material in a very ‘bad videogame’ way.

      4. Daemian Lucifer says:

        Having two things with the same setting is not the same as having two things with the same name.

  3. Torsten says:

    Dead Island is a co-op game, similar to Left 4 Dead and Dead Rising. Multiplayer often makes people treat a game more favourably, because even if the game isn’t good, they like the experience playing with their friends.

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      They really shouldnt though.Not at a time when we have good multiplayer games aplenty.

      (which is why it baffles me that people are still playing ….shit,I forgot the name of the crappy game.The one with dinklebot in it)

      1. Abnaxis says:

        I’m actually kind of eyeing Dead Island for the multplayer after this Spoiler Warning. Action RPGs with multiplayer, where the focus isn’t “team up with 3 or more random people on the internet* to beat this epic HP-sponge!” are actually kind of niche. In fact, most of my favorite games for playing multiplayer are games you would never, ever find within 3 degrees of a “Top X” list today. At least one (Gladius) you’ve probably never even heard of

        If it had split-screen Dead Island would already be in my library. Also, I find the T&A in a zombie apocalypse tiresome.

        *”Teams smaller than 4 people need not apply”

        1. Daemian Lucifer says:

          I'm actually kind of eyeing Dead Island for the multplayer after this Spoiler Warning. Action RPGs with multiplayer, where the focus isn't “team up with 3 or more random people on the internet* to beat this epic HP-sponge!”Âť are actually kind of niche.

          Diablo 3 does it better though.

      2. Jeff says:

        I’m not aware of any multiplayer games like Dead Island, though. L4D certainly doesn’t count, since Dead Island has persistent inventory, skill trees, and the like. It’s pretty much an FPS-RPG hybrid.

    2. Sleeping Dragon says:

      It is very much this. Me and a friend got Dead Island from a co-op bundle. Being the one who spends more time on vidya games I fired it up solo so that we had one of us who kinda knew the mechanics… I don’t think I got to the beach, I definitely didn’t get as far as Chris in these episodes.

      For some odd reason we fired it up in coop anyway, and while we literally groaned at nearly every plot point and the mechanics were often frustrating we still had fun. At this point I’m starting to consider if poking my eye with a sharp stick wouldn’t be fun in co-op with friends.

      1. SharpeRifle says:

        Everything is more fun if you can do it drunk with your friends.

        Except possibly Naked Polo.

  4. Ledel says:

    I think the reason for Dead Island having far higher review scores is that it at least feels a little bit like a power fantasy. In Dead Island if you see five zombies grouped together you feel like you can take them all out without much trouble, in Survival Instinct you’d want to try to stealth kill 2 or 3 of them before it felt like you could take them on. Another reason would probably be for it having open world and RPG elements.

    Also, Dead Island gives you a protagonist you can put yourself into, while Survival Instinct you are in the character of Darryl. So they are already bogged down with the fact that you are controlling the badass Darryl, but their game doesn’t have you feeling like a badass when you are playing it.

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      Have you seen the videos for survival instinct?You can kill literal armies of zombies without losing any health with that stabbing minigame.

    2. MrGuy says:

      I think the open world aspects are the big difference. The kids all love their open world games these days, and the AAA games almost always feel “open world.”

      It’s hard to make an open world game – you have to build a LOT of gameworld, and anticipate a LOT of possible player actions, orderings of encounters, etc. Building a competent, playable open world game makes a game feel like a AAA title, and I think that bends minds towards “wow, this is an impressive game.” Recall – FO3 was a game of the year, and it wasn’t the writing or the combat mechanics that made it so. People aren’t over the Open World concept as a “wow” factor yet, so open world games are still something that boost scores.

      Compare to Survival Instinct, where you’re shunted between a progression of small, cramped levels where you have one main objective to accomplish, and when it’s done, you’re on to the next one. The game feels “small,” and most of the combat feels shoehorned in as padding. For example, the hilariously contrived “Your car broke down. Go into the house you conveniently stopped in front of, which is swarming with endlessly respawning enemies, and find a new tire. No, not that tire! That tire doesn’t count. Go get the one sitting in the middle of the living room.”

  5. Gunther says:

    Man, I suddenly want to play Condemned again so I can experience a game focused around first person melee fighting with random objects… that was made by competent people.

    Maybe not WRITTEN by competent people, but the mechanics were damned solid.

    1. Michael says:

      I miss Monolith. F.E.A.R., Condemned, AvP2. So many good horror/action games. So many absolutely weird and baffling sequels, F.E.A.R. 2, Condemned 2…

  6. Wide And Nerdy says:

    Props to Chris for the Yoohoo joke LMAO. I name it the Spoiler Warning Joke of the Week.

    1. Tizzy says:

      Definitely giving Ruts a run for his money… it had the slow buildup reminiscent of Ruts’ most groan-inducing offerings.

  7. Zephyr1990 says:

    Or it might be that some people actually liked Dead Island… even if I often feel like i was the only one it the world that did.

    Still I did have a lot of fun with it, I liked crafting the crazy weapons, I liked the combat, and even though the story isn’t great I still enjoyed finding out what happened there.

    Admittedly there was one point I got stuck on in the whole game and while i did have to no clip past that one every other challenge I was able to overcome with no real problem.

    Still in all honestly i had more fun with this game than any of the supposedly great survival-horror games of the past.

  8. Grudgeal says:

    Your shovel snapped in half after you’ve stowed in a few heads with the solid steel edge? Shovel Knight disapproves.

    1. Andy_Panthro says:

      The Shoveler from Mystery Men would probably disapprove too.

      1. Adam says:

        Sam B does not shovel well at all…

        1. NoneCallMeTim says:

          Given how bad this game is, does it qualify as shovelware?

          1. Syal says:

            I think the shovel wear is obvious.

      2. Tuck says:

        ‘t were an oak shaft, Spear and Jackson number three, wit’ reinforced brass ‘andle. Steel scoop wit’ copper rim edgin’. Bit o’t’ ‘andle broke off!

        (here endeth the obscure reference)

  9. Twisted_Ellipses says:

    The ending of Dead Island should’ve been that you escape to a boat, only for your rescuers to realise you’re Sam B. Then they say “hey! didn’t you write that song bragging about having a zombie army?”, followed by a smash cut to your arrest & trial…

  10. Bropocalypse says:

    I’ve never played either of these games, but from what I’ve seen of Chris playing them, Dead Island looks like it has better gamefeel than WD:SI. Also, Dead Island looks less claustrophobic. The whole time I was watching your WD:SI playthrough I was thinking “this looks tiny. And the zombies really confine you.”

    1. Chris says:

      It does have better game feel than Walking Dead, but not by too much. About the only thing that really feels “right” is the kick mechanic. But weapons are all pretty flimsy, the slow-mo effect feels triggered at random, the bad guys are meat shields that don’t react to a shovel to the face – on the whole it’s still quite bad.

      1. Adam says:

        Was that an actual slo-mo effect? It looked more like the game was poorly-coded and chugging for no reason.

      2. Endymion says:

        Well a minor system that was totally missed here was the limb damage thing, which really helps out with the bigger dudes once you figure it out and once you have weapons that can actually break/cut off limbs reliably. The game doesn’t really reach that point until chapter 2 though. Eventually those thugs go down easy just by slicing off or breaking their left arm and then learning to dodge the one attack cycle they have with their left arm.

        Then there are a bunch of fun gimmicks like the elemental damage system, throwing weapons, and the other various special zombies. They add enough variety, even if it is slightly meaningless variety, to make the game eons more entertaining than the dozen or so animations Walking Dead had.

        The problem that is really ran into here is that Dead Island doesn’t actually let any of that stuff into the game at the start. They start out with only the most boring bits of the game present, and it isn’t until chapter 2 and chapter 3 that they start to introduce the fun stuff. And a lot of that stuff really isn’t that great, a lot of mechanics are shallow and don’t makes sense, but it has a number of redeeming qualities.

        1. Thomas says:

          And alternately, the worst thing about Survival Instinct is the repetition and when you begin to realise that all the game systems which seemed interesting are fundamentally broken. So it sounds like Survival Instinct gets worse with repeat viewing and Dead Island better (a little bit)

      3. Duoae says:

        Slow-mo is usually when you’re scoring a critical hit or a killing/debilitating blow.

  11. Daemian Lucifer says:

    Who the hell carries a gas can like that?

    1. Bropocalypse says:

      Someone who is a FPS character, who also carries pistols at either arm’s length, directly in front of their vision, or somewhere in between at all times.

  12. Daemian Lucifer says:

    Josh,you are a genius!Seeing how Phil LaMarr is voicing sam b,and he is also voicing hermes conrad,I can totally see sam b as a bureaucrat who hands everyone a blank form they have to fill in before he does a quest for them.

  13. Daemian Lucifer says:

    On Metacritic, The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct (which we covered last week) has 38 on metacritic

    Too many metacritics.

    By the way,Shamoose,could you include blockquote in your tags blurb above the comments?It gets kind of annoying having to constantly type it(twice)in order to quote something.A copy/paste friendly blurb would be appreciated.

    1. Dave B. says:

      Or, just to remind me whether it is [quote] or [blockquote] since I always seem to use the wrong one…

      1. MichaelGC says:

        Plus we might get a cool Darth Vader (block)quote!

    2. wumpus says:

      Also,

      “The scores are closer is we go by user reviews…”

      is -> if

      (This is in the first ‘footnote’.)

  14. Blake says:

    Dead Island has interesting looking areas which I quite enjoyed the first time I saw them.
    And the whole gameplay thing of running around, killing zombies with random implements was totally fine to sit down with a friend and play through for a night over a bunch of drinks.
    TWD though just doesn’t seem to have any interesting moments. Not even worth laughing at.

    Dead Island I could treat as a bad (but big budget) B movie, TWD looks like a crappy student project.

    Maybe if TWD had of had a big budget and a lot of time it could have become something good, but as it stands Dead Island is the better product.

  15. Daemian Lucifer says:

    So you have a cleaver that somehow breaks after a few dozen swings,but it can DECAPITATE someone in a single swing?Damn,I need to get me that cleaver,it would solve all of my meat cleaving woes.

    1. Humanoid says:

      You’d need a whole box of them to prepare one meal though.

  16. Daemian Lucifer says:

    I have a funny observation:

    All these dudes that are practically naked,get BLOODY SCREEN,SO REAL and sweat pouring down the camera because…the developers thought it would look cool(it doesnt).And yet the one guy who actually should have various stuff oozing in front of him like that,gordon freeman,constantly has perfect vision.

    1. Abnaxis says:

      On the other hand, in Metroid Prime Samus gets ooze all over her visor constanlty. I actually think the effect is pretty neat (though I haven’t played any of the Primes in quite a while)

      1. Michael says:

        If your character is wearing a helmet, and seeing through a visor, then you have a ready made explanation for why the viscera and water getting splashed on them shows up on screen.

        On the other hand, there’s no explanation for them seeing their own blood splashed around on the visor, because that would require them literally spraying blood into their own eyes.

        I mean, I actually liked the screen flicker in Crysis when the player got hit. It conveys a nice, ‘yeah, you got messed up a bit’ without making the game impossible to play. Dead Island? Yeah, I don’t even know what they were thinking.

        1. I don’t know if it’s the case for this game, but I’m pretty sure I know the reason for the whole “blood on your eyes” effect in FPSs: It’s because of third-person mode.

          Take Fallout 3/NV. You can play in first-person or third. If you’re in third, it kind of makes sense that blood appears on your FOV because you’re looking at your avatar through a kind of “camera.” The blood is a visual reminder that your dude is losing health, because his vital fluids are being sprayed everywhere.

          It then shows up on your first-person view because nobody has the time/money to give a crap about coding another visual cue that you’re being injured. If a game lacks a 3rd person view, I’d chalk the use of blood-eyes up to the devs having adopted it as some kind of standard effect that doesn’t require coming up with a more creative solution.

          1. Daemian Lucifer says:

            I dont think it was the third person game that first introduced this.I think it was a progression in first person games from the small red indicator that was showing where you were being shot from,to a bigger indicator covering a whole side of the screen,to all the borders becoming red when you are nearing death(probably first used in call of duty),to BLOODY SCREEN SO REAL!

            1. Abnaxis says:

              The blood on the screen isn’t supposed to be realistic. It’s supposed to be an indicator to players that their health is low, so they need to star chugging energy drink/GTFO.

              The way I remember it, the bloody screen started becoming popular when games with regenerating health started being a thing. A lot of them didn’t even have a display for health, your screen just got progressively more red/bloody, and if you got away from what was damaging you the effect would gradually fade out. Silent Hills 2 did something similar, except it used the vibration on the PS2’s dual-shock controller, and health didn’t regenerate.

              I *think* the original idea was to make the game more immersive by using a minimalist interface, except it’s really frustrating when you have no idea how close your character is to death, so there needs to be some sort of feedback. Of course, now devs just throw it in everywhere, because this is AAA and we can’t have a popular game that does a thing without every single other game blithely copying it. However, I don’t think anyone involved has any delusion of it being “realistic.”

              1. Daemian Lucifer says:

                The red borders around the screen were there just as indicators that you are critical,and Im ok with those(if they are reasonably done that is).But the actual blood covering your whole screen was done for “realism”,and is just stupid.

                1. Michael says:

                  Especially when it also comes with a smeary filter across the entire screen… like what Dead Island is pulling.

                  1. Abnaxis says:

                    No way. Nobody, in the history of making video games, thought that smearing blood on the screen is super “realistic.”

                    It’s supposed to be immersive, which is different. You’re not supposed t5o see the blood an think “O man I just splashed blood up into my eyes from my liver when I got shot!” you’re supposed to think “Oh shit it’s blood I’m in trouble!” Because humans are wired to feel danger when they see blood.

                    Bloody screens aren’t design to be realistic, any more than Mr. Yuck is supposed to be an accurate portrayal to help children recognize the symptoms of poison. It’s meant to prompt a response, not be taken literally.

          2. Michael says:

            With Fallout 3 and New Vegas, there’s a real chance your character is, actually wearing some kind of armor that covers their eyes. I don’t like the effect there either. But, it’s possible there’s an in setting justification.

            Which reminds me: I still need to do a Project: Nevada playthrough. :

  17. Octapode says:

    In the game’s defence on the body burning, a single coating of liquid fuel will not heat the bodies for long enough to get it to properly combust. A pyre like that would be the proper way to do things.

    That said, they should be using diesel not petrol for lighting the fire if they don’t want to set themselves on fire like a bunch of idiots, and those logs looked far too fat to light easily.

    1. Thomas says:

      And burning corpses is a kind of hilarious in this kind of game anyway. You created like 10x as many piles of corpses just walking over to get the gas

    2. Groboclown says:

      I just want to make sure I understand that quest right.

      Let’s see. You want to get an incendiary weapon. Which requires gas. So you talk to the guy who needs gas to burn bodies, and he’ll make you an incendiary weapon with said gas. To get the gas, you need to start a generator which will start the pumps at a gas station, which gives you gas that you can carry to the guy who wants to burn the bodies.

      Here’s how they could fix it. The generator was broken, and you need some gas to get the mechanic’s truck to drive to the gas station, which will need some gas to power his tools in order to fix the generator. And the generator needs gas.

      1. Groboclown says:

        And what’s powering those keypad gates?

      2. Daemian Lucifer says:

        Also you ate some beans last night and have constant gas.

      3. Thomas says:

        To be fair powering a generator to pump petrol isn’t that stupid. It’s not like it’s a 1:1 ratio of petrol used to petrol pumped. If it took the amount of power stored in petrol to pump petrol, then there would be literally no point in petrol stations.

        The same for using a torch with batteries to find batteries. If you’ve got a pile of batteries lying around and a torch with batteries, there’s no point saying “oh I will just remove the battery for my torch”

        Admittedly this is kind of spoiled by him not needing much gas. If he was trying to get petrol to fuel a car (which he drives around at the petrol station -_-) it would make sense

  18. Disc says:

    “I'm just curious as to why Dead Island is rated so much higher.”

    I’m throwing a wild guess and say it could have something to do with the game having a standalone expansion/proto-sequel released and Dead Island 2 being in the making. I.e. that your perceptions are skewed and that there is in fact an enjoyable game hidden behind the seemingly impenetrable veil.

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      But the good expansion shouldnt vindicate the bad base game.American nightmare doesnt make alan wake any better,nor do hordes of the underdark make nwn any less boring.

      1. Disc says:

        That wasn’t what I was saying, but okay.

  19. Groboclown says:

    Was “Dan Mark” supposed to be a pun on Denmark? Am I just grasping for anything in this game?

  20. Christopher says:

    Considering the last weeks of Spoiler Warning, to me Survival Instinct looks way uglier, appears to play worse, does not have the Borderlands-style cooperative multiplayer and colored mmo-loot or the “aiming melee with the right stick”-thing the reviewers I read liked about Dead Island. It is based on a franchise that already has a highly successful game in a way different genre made by other people, looked like it was a lazy license game, did not have the positive buzz of Dead Island’s trailer and the negative buzz of its controversies and was released a whole two years later, the same year as Dead Rising 3/Dead Space 3/State of Decay/The Last of Us, costing as much as every AAA game. On the other hand, on wikipedia it doesn’t look like any other major zombie game was released in 2011(Just a ton of other types of really great games). The Walking Dead Season 1, Borderlands 2(loot co-op-wise) and even RE6 were 2012.

    The reviewers I read that gave Dead Island a high score said that it was fun enough for them to make up for the flaws it has in story, technical issues and the linear areas. It probably wouldn’t be enough for me, although I think it’s much more fun to watch than Survival Instinct, but I’m not having a hard time seeing why one got more press than the other. It doesn’t seem like a big mystery, in fact I sort of feel like you answered your own question. The dates I bothered to look up make it seem like it had a niche to fill, too.

    “Booty and cleavage” and that ending cracked me up, by the way.

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      “Booty and cleavage”Âť and that ending cracked me up, by the way.

      There was no need for you to spread the pun wider.

      1. Christopher says:

        Aw come on!

        1. Groboclown says:

          I kind of treasured that pun.

    2. Michael says:

      Just cherry picking, but, RE6 could be an amusing week of Spoiler Warning. The writing is endearingly stupid rather than maliciously offensive.

  21. AR+ says:

    Back up generators normally run on diesel or propane/natural gas. As has been pointed out here before, gasoline has a shelf-life, so it would be very inconvenient to have to drain the tank every year that you don’t have a long enough power outage to run it dry. Also, gasoline is more dangerous to handle than diesel, and so is not the preferred fuel if you don’t need to squeeze out the last bit of marginal power density in your engine.

  22. Phantos says:

    Come to think of it… has there EVER been a decent game with zombies in it? At least from the last decade?

    The only ones that come to mind for me are Minecraft and Plants vs. Zombies. The rest all seem to have multiple, horrible game-destroying flaws.

    1. Shamus says:

      I’m a huge fan of Left 4 Dead.

      1. Phantos says:

        Man, I wish I had the experiences with that game that you had. I feel like I got a cursed copy of that game or something.

        1. Abnaxis says:

          When did you start playing? What modes?

          The other 3 people on your team make a HUGE difference on how much fun you have with L4D. In my own experience, the community around the game tends to swing around from “insufferable elitist” to “mostly incompetent,” with occasional periods of “holy crap this is really fun.” It really depends on when you decide to play.

          In fact, I’ve made a rule for myself that I can never play Versus on Friday or Saturday, because that’s when you can’t find a single game that isn’t populated by a team of assholes spamming voice commands steamrolling a team of incompetents who can’t make it more than 10′ out of the safe room.

          1. krellen says:

            Shamus has played Left 4 Dead with me and he still doesn’t hate it, so it can’t all be the players. ;)

          2. Phantos says:

            Whether it’s with friends, randos or the A.I., it feels the same: Me doing all of the work for 3 useless morons. Which isn’t helped by the hit-detection that always works when it’s the zombies but maybe 1% of the time when I attack anything. It’s a game where you can only shoot things, and have to depend on others, when both of those things do not function properly.

            Some games have bugs. Left 4 Dead feels like a bug, with bits of a video game around it. It’s such a malfunctioning, frustrating waste of time, I’d swear I was playing as Sonic the Hedgehog.

            And the sequel is EVEN WORSE. It completely ruined the Versus mode’s scoring system by just rewarding people for rushing through and not helping their team-mates(in a co-op game). It took out the snappy writing and characters and replaced them with unlikable, 1-dimensional dimwits. It forced that boring “Collect The Gas Cans” mode into the main game, instead of having actual conclusions to the campaigns where you try to find the right place to hold out and wait for rescue. And the Director is even more needlessly cruel. So not only does it deprive you of items and weapons when you need them, and give them to you when you don’t need them, it also made it so there’s a horde event every five seconds, AND a tank, AND a witch, AND four different special infected that incapacitate players so there’s no way to win, ever.

            I hate Left 4 Dead, you guys. I hate that series so much, it makes me glad that Half-Life 3 will never happen. At some point, Valve forgot how to make a FPS.

            1. Wolf says:

              I am so very confuse right now.
              Literally none of your experiences in L4D gel with mine. (OK I can agree that the characters in L4D2 are kinda boring)
              Although you feeling like you are dragging around a bunch of useless morons when you play with friends makes me think you are not cut out for coop games.

              1. Abnaxis says:

                No, you definitely have to be moron tolerant to be able to play L4D if you’re playing with random people. Especially if you play Versus, it only takes one useless moron to ruin an entire game. That’s partly why I like the game–a lot of Versus is in figuring out which human player is the weakest, isolating them from the herd, and sowing confusion so mistakes will be made. Because if the humans don’t make mistakes the infected have no chance.

                Valve hit detection (or rather, hit prediction) is also a thing of horror. The humans are almost never actually where they’re shown on your screen. You usually have to aim for where you think they are going rather than where they are, and it winds up being 50% luck. On the human side, that also means a lot of times where the infected clearly missed by a mile on your screen but you still get pinned. It’s frustrating, but you can get used to it if you are enjoying yourself (and rage at it if you aren’t).

                Changing Versus scoring was dumb. I miss the way it used to be scored.

                On the other hand, I still really like L4D, and I like L4D2 even more. IIRC, the director was made more “fair,” by making it give both teams the exact same item spawns and (theoretically) the same tank/witch spawns. It doesn’t give any fewer healing items as you do worse in Versus-in fact, it doesn’t change how many spawn at all. The are more incapping zombies, but they virtually never all spawn at the same time (1 slot is almost always reserved for Boomer/Spitter). In L4D1 all you had to do was pop the boomer for a 4-cap, but it pretty much never happens in L4D2.

                “Find the right place on the map to hold out” degenerated into “find the place where it’s impossible for the SI to reach you” in L4D1 Versus, and in fact all the new infected were designed to counteract nonsense degenerate strategies that made certain sections of L4D1 nothing but a time sink. The gas-can levels still require careful planning, but it’s planning the ideal path to get the cans in as fast as you can rather than planning which corner you want to squat in.

                Again, a lot of this is personal preference. I would definitely not suggest you ever play L4D if you hate it (the game has a way of magnifying negative feelings), but I wanted to put in my 2 cents about what you were talking about.

                1. Phantos says:

                  Oh man, I just remembered the worst part of Versus in Left 4 Dead 2:

                  One player idling in the starting safety room, because they’re mad that their team lost the first round. And unlike the Campaign, the game won’t switch idling players to the A.I.

                  And when you try to kick them for not playing, someone always votes to keep them in, even though they are literally ruining everything for everyone. And people who actually want to play the game can’t get in, because this jerk won’t leave, but also won’t play. Like they think that’s getting revenge against the other team, when it’s actually just hurting his own team.

                  Valve made a horrible game, and then the community stood up and shouted: “Let’s make it worse!”

              2. Phantos says:

                I’m not asking for MLG Pro levels of skill here. But when I see people run out into the open, away from the group during a crescendo(like the elevator wait in No Mercy), or constantly staying as far away from the group as possible in the finale?

                It’s one thing when people do that the first five times. But it’s like the people who play this game refuse to accept that it isn’t Halo. And they never learn from their mistakes, and I end up paying for it.

                And these are the same jackoffs who will kick you the moment they find out you don’t use a mic. Because surely THAT will be the downfall: not having people drowning out important sound cues with ear-poison.

                “MAN, KANYE IS SO COOL, MAN. HERE LET ME PLAY HIS SONG THROUGH THE GARBLED TIN CAN THAT IS VOICE-CHAT ON XBOX LIVE-

                WTF WHEN DID THE TANK SHOW UP

                I CANNOT POSSIBLY IMAGINE HOW THIS HAPPENED”

    2. Deadfast says:

      I quite enjoyed Dying Light. Funny thing is that it’s from the same exact developer as this train wreck. It’s a magical example of developers actually learning from their mistakes.

    3. Chris says:

      There are plenty of good zombie games:

      Dead Rising, Left 4 Dead, The (Good) Walking Dead, Plants Vs Zombies. And some failures that at least do some really interesting stuff – DayZ, State of Decay, ZombieU, Plants Vs Zombies: Garden Warfare, etc. And those are just games about zombies, nevermind games that feature zombies as incidental villains or have short zombie sections (like Minecraft).

      1. Phantos says:

        Oh, I forgot about State of Decay!

        I mean, I forgot I was playing it, and I haven’t touched it in months. I think most of my group might have died since then.

        But yeah, I do kind of dig that one.

        1. Deadpool says:

          They’re probably alive. The game grows more and more forgiving the longer you stay away from it…

          1. Phantos says:

            I checked back in: Not only were there no fatalities, my group actually had accumulated TOO MUCH food, water, bullets, etc.

            The game goes better when I’m not involved, it seems. It’s like the opposite of Left 4 Dead.

    4. Benjamin Hilton says:

      The best zombie game that I have played was Apocalypse Weekend, the expansion for Postal 2.

      WAIT WAIT hear me out.

      When most people talk about good zombie games, they point to the likes of Left For Dead. And while that is a very fun game, it never felt like a ZOMBIE game to me. Fighting the horde always felt more like gunning down a mass of zerglings than like fighting zombies. Apocalypse weekend was the only game I played where you MUST destroy the head. The zombies were slow and stupid, but you could still easily get overwhelmed if you weren’t smart. Empty as many rounds into their chests as you want and they just keep coming. Light it on fire and it’s more dangerous than it was before. The game even teases you by giving you access to a scythe, and watching you run around like an idiot cutting them in half, only to realize that you now have a mass of crawling torsos to deal with.

      TL;DR Apocalypse Weekend is the only game I’ve played where zombies feel like zombies.

    5. Michael says:

      Some iterations of Wolfenstein come to mind. Including the 2009 Raven shooter.

      The Necromorphs in Dead Space are basically “space zombies,” and that’s actually a pretty entertaining series of games.

      Depending on how you cut it, the Resident Evil franchise is, or is not, a good example. There’s been some real garbage (Operation: Racoon City, or whatever it was called, comes to mind.) But, at the same time, RE6 may not have been a good survival horror game, but it was an endearingly stupid Japanese take on Gears of War.

      Terraria.

      Grim Dawn’s pretty good. It’s kickstarter/early access budgeting shows, but it’s a solid DiabloClone.

      Dark Souls. Since, “zombie” is actually a pretty good encapsulation of the setting’s undead. Even if they’re not brain eating ghouls.

      Pillars of Eternity gets credit for having some of the most flat out disturbing zombies I’ve seen in awhile. Not, technically, undead. But, if you’ve played that and didn’t read up on the Wichts, you should probably go rectify that… I’ll be here, somewhere.

      I think Divinity Original Sin had zombies. I’m not 100% sure, but there was a nice mix of undead.

      Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon… though I guess that’s kinda a spoiler.

      Saints Row: The Third. Though it’s kind of a gag. I get what they were doing with the franchise now, but at the time I didn’t take to this one. Actually, there’s zombie Easter Eggs in the original two games as well. It probably also extends to include Gat out of Hell, depending on how you’re counting.

      X-COM. Specifically the Firaxis reboot.

      Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes… because that’s not a mouthful. It’s not a fantastic game, but it’s a very flexible classic Heroes of Might and Magic/Civilization style 4x. Though the zombies are kind of a gag unit. One of the DLC releases added a full undead faction which can use the same unit mechanic on their custom units, though.

      Borderlands… if you play the first DLC.

      The STALKER titles are flawed, but kind of brilliant. The zombies aren’t undead, but had their brains fried by leftover Soviet technology.

      So, yeah, there are a few. There’s also a lot of really terrible ones.

      1. IFS says:

        Divinity Original Sin did have zombies, they were just outnumbered by the skeletons fighting with them. They were also interesting to fight since every time you hit them they’d exude poison gas (which was also explosive) around them. If you set them on fire they’d also explode every time you hit them, which could be hilarious.

    6. Jokerman says:

      My favorite game (probably) of the last generation is a zombie game… that being the Walking Dead.

      Do Half Life 2, Dishonored, Last of us, Resi 4 count?

    7. Starker says:

      Rebuild.

    8. Disc says:

      It’s beating a dead horse at this point, but I’ll still say: Dead Island. The start does a lot of things wrong, but at the core there is a game that works.

      DI: Riptide is still a sight better. The big differences are new characters starting from level 15 (so you’re not gimped from the start) and a separate weapon skill leveling which gives you motivation to use weapon types outside your character specifc ones.

      And I’m surprised no-one mentioned Killing Floor yet. I haven’t played it that much, but I’ve had fun with it and it’s pretty popular.

  23. Grimwear says:

    I love how at the 23 minute mark you break your shovel in half on the zombie then go to throw it down on the ground where it subsequently materializes into a complete shovel once more, only one you cant pick up.

  24. General Karthos says:

    I think it has to do with the fact that everything in Survival Instinct appears to be grey, brown, and dull green while Dead Island has lush, colorful environments.

    That and metacritic is a TERRIBLE place to get an idea of how good a game actually is. The more hyped upon release a game is, the higher the score. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that companies pay for good reviews (except we all know that they do) but it seems like even without that, if a game is a big name release, it gets a good review as a result. Mass Effect 2 rates higher than Mass Effect, despite the fact that Mass Effect was easily the superior game of the two of them. (Mass Effect 3 has an equal score to Mass Effect 1.) Crusader Kings II got an 82, while Europa Universalis IV got an 87. The two have their strengths and weaknesses, but Europa Universalis is the flagship game of the company, so it was a bigger release.

    1. Thomas says:

      I think if you polled 100 people, 70+ of them would tell you that Mass Effect 2 was the better game. I know all my friends at school though it was the better game when it came out, and Mass Effect 2 frequently ends up higher in ‘best of’ lists.

      Shamus’ site has a warping effect for people for like ME1 better than ME2. And in general people who read gaming sites are more likely to like ME1 than ME2, because more ‘ordinary’ people get put off by the complete lack of AI or structure and general cheapness of the side plots, all the horrible enforced Mako sections etc.

      And lots of people feel like the characters in ME2 are better. Garrus, Wrex and Tali are great character but when you play ME1 you realise they don’t actually say anything or do anything. Like at all. You complete Wrex’s personal quest and it’s one line of dialogue along the lines “huh this old thing”. That’s it. That’s how much character they put into the whole questline. In some ways you learn more about Wrex in ME2 than you do in ME1

  25. Destrustor says:

    I know why the doctor has a sickle.
    He’s a druid. He uses the sickle to collect herbs and such.

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      But where are the wild boars?

      1. Zombies love pork when they can’t get long pork :)

      2. Gruhunchously says:

        They were all eaten by the menhir delivery zombies. Or ‘thugs’, as the game seems fit to call them.

        1. Aw, now I can’t be happy until someone makes that mod. Get to work, Internet!

    2. MichaelGC says:

      Yup, I was thinking that too. :D

  26. Exasperation says:

    In fairness to the game, the woman who died and was buried on the beach and the woman who urgently needed medical treatment were two different uninteresting poorly characterized npcs that the game didn’t make you care enough about to pay attention to their names.

    Look, I said in fairness to the game, not in support of the game, OK?

    Also, the ending to this video is absolutely perfect.

  27. Macfeast says:

    Aww, I was hoping to hear your reaction to “They're massacring me!”.

    1. Hitch says:

      That line wasn’t about the zombies. That was Sam B yelling about the Spoiler Warning crew as he committed suicide.

  28. Michael says:

    Dead Island’s a AAA game. Video game journalists won’t give it a bad review because they can’t risk making AAA companies angry. The user reviews are also higher because Dead Island was better publicized, and so a lot more people, people with terrible taste, played it and liked it.

    1. Michael says:

      Deep Silver is AAA now?

      Honestly, in this case, Deep Silver has never really been in the position of pushing for favorable reviews. And they’ve turned out a lot of garbage. As evidenced by their average metacritic score being 60. In fact, Dead Island was their first title to break out of the 70s.

      “Review Dead Island highly or we won’t give you review codes for Ride to Hell: Retribution!” Yeah… that would have probably lowered Dead Island’s review scores, just as self preservation.

  29. Dreadjaws says:

    I’m positive one of the main reasons for this is that people have simply become less lenient towards bad games. I imagine that if this game had come before Dead Island, it would be the latter the one with a lower score.

    People probably compare the two and are less forgiving of TWD because they realize it could have learned from Dead Island’s mistakes but it didn’t.

  30. pdk1359 says:

    Rutskarn’s idea at the 5:00 mark sounds kinda cool, actually. Drop off the weapon/armor/etc to upgrade at a designated location (workbench, fairy circle, obsidian monolith, etc) and leave an offering. The quality of the offering (grade of beverage or amount of money, etc) determines the quality of the upgrade when you return for the finished product.
    Gives me an idea for a Skyrim mod.

  31. Corpital says:

    I just remembered (and couldn’t find it mentioned the other two videos) about Dead Island Riptide. It’s special edition included a statuette of one of those sexy bikini zombies’ torso with hacked off head and arms and blood everywhere.

    edit: and justed reached to point, where Josh mentions it. Dammit, Josh. And my own impatience.

  32. Adam says:

    I played through this and Dead Island Riptide with my girlfriend. It wasn’t great but there were a few reasons I think this got a better rating.

    1. The sound design on this game I thought was really good. It’s a bit lost in the stream with conversations. But in the city I was especially creeped out by the ambient sounds of the city and general zombies. I think the voice acting was a let down as being Australian those accents just sounded terrible, and if they were supposed to be New Zealand accents, my girlfriend being a New Zealander, thought that they were terrible.

    2. The co-op was actually a bit of fun, running around helping out with someone scratched a particular itch. The other point was that scaling in multi-player was done rather well. I could be level 30 and another player could be 15. But we could play the same area and the same enemy would appear to be different levels to different players.

    3. Parts of the combat felt okayish, the ability to hit certain limbs and the like made it a bit more interesting as you could cripple certain enemies by lopping their arms off. There was also a certain bloodthirsty appeal to being able to hack people apart in a way that wasn’t too ludicrous (though certainly not realistic).

    4. You can actually turn off the enemies level with you (it’s in options -> gameplay from memory).

    Other than that, it looked pretty enough and certain gameplay aspects (the active skills) were interesting enough. Each of the environments actually felt different enough to be interesting (not good, just different).

    That’s the only thing I can think of that would somewhat redeem the game.

  33. Neko says:

    I wonder how much of the aversion to the driving sequences was due to the player not being on the side of the car that you lot are used to. As a UK-born Aussie, I certainly find things quite disorienting when games have left-hand-side drive and all the cars on the road are going the wrong way… Although TBH in Saints Row 3 I usually found it easier to drive in the oncoming traffic lane anyway.

    Then again, how many games successfully pull off a first-person driving experience? Most of them pull the camera out to third-person. And Dead Island’s abysmal FOV is not gonna do you any favours while inside a car.

    1. Michael says:

      The Far Cry series does a pretty good job with first person driving. I suppose someone’s going to be annoyed if Half-Life 2 doesn’t get a nod there as well. I don’t know about GTA5 in first person. What I’ve seen looks decent.

  34. Deadpool says:

    Survival Instinct came in shortly after ANOTHER Walking Dead game. The comparison was not favorable.

    Second thing is that Dead Island has co op.

    I played it co op and we had a ton of fun despite its stupidity because we have fun hanging out with each other…

  35. Duoae says:

    Having watched all three episodes I’m wondering whether Chris was playing with manual aiming or auto-aiming (or whatever it’s called)…

    I always play this series with manual aiming so it doesn’t auto-target body parts or whatever.

    Aside from that, I can understand where the criticisms on the show are coming from but I kind of feel the critiques of how unrealistic the game is are a bit off the point. Like criticising Mario because mushrooms don’t increase your size…

    Dead Island isn’t a realistic game series: it’s hackneyed and arcadey but, IMO, the combat system is very rewarding and challenging. Sure, the weapons degrade too quickly (though I think later on there’s a skill to make them degrade more slowly?) but at the end of the day the game systems work in their own way even if they make no sense in the game world or our world.

    1. Ivan says:

      No-one is knocking the game for just being unrealistic, people rarely do. What’s wrong is that the weapon degradation in Dead Island is neither realistic nor is it fun. It would actually be better to compare this to mario’s super human jumping abilities, no one cares that he can jump upwards of three times his height because it is a fun gameplay mechanic. Weapon degradation does very little to actually improve Dead Island and a great deal to ruin it.

      First of all, Dead island is a tangled mess of conflicting mechanics and themes. I assume that weapon degradation was included in order to encourage the sort of desperate scavenging and improvisation that is often one of our favorite parts of the post-apocalypse zombie survival genera. The problem is that desperation conflicts with one of the core themes of the game, Empowerment. It’s clear that Dead Island is an empowerment fantasy because of the inclusion of leveling mechanics (even if they then shoot themselves in the foot by leveling the zombies as well). Empowerment is reinforced at every opportunity because you will never be encounter an opponent that you are not meant to be able to destroy.

      Weapon crafting compliments the empowerment fantasy by giving you access to new and more powerful tools. Weapon degradation directly conflicts with the crafting mechanic by then discouraging you from using those tools. If the right balance was struck then degradation may be able to co-exist with crafting, but in Dead Island they ere’d too far on the flimsy side of things which strongly discourages players from using their best gear. Yes you can repair your gear, but unless you know where a crafting bench is you are risking being without your best gear when you need it most, also this is extra busy work for the player adding downtime when they are not able to move towards their objective because they need to backtrack to fix their stuff.

      There is also the looting mechanics, which weapon degradation both compliments and conflicts with. Degradation encourages looting, using and discarding, however the rarity of certain weapons encourages hording. Again, if the right balance was struck here these mechanics could co-exist, or in this case even compliment each other, but everything you find is both too flimsy and ineffective or to rare to waste.

      It’s been a while since I last played this game and I’m pretty sure there are a few more mechanics and tones that are tripping over each other, especially where guns are concerned, but I think you should get the idea by now.

      Oh yeah, the worst part is that degradation is mostly a redundant mechanic because as the zombies level up you’ll need to find/build stronger weapons to deal with them anyway.

      1. Duoae says:

        Well, okay I disagree and think you’ve just contradicted your argument a little there:

        If the degradation mechanic is too fast, forcing you to get and scavenge new weapons then you complain that you need to find new weapons that do higher damage that drop/spawn as you level up to defeat the higher level zombies… that works pretty well, IMO.

        The mechanic forces/encourages you to upgrade to newer weapons, try new fighting styles (slow, fast, blunt, blades etc.) and not get hung up on a particular weapon and accidentally keep it way past its useful lifetime.

        You have plenty of weapon slots in the game so having 4-5 different “primary” weapons is pretty easy and since weapons can be repaired you can still keep them around a long time.

        Yes, at lower levels the game is harder than at higher levels because you don’t have the resources (i.e. money to repair or parts to make modified weapons) or the skills (which make the game easier) but it doesn’t mean the mechanic doesn’t make sense.

        The problem here (and this is where I agree with you) is that the balance of where these things work best is at the late stages of the game – by which point you’ve struggled through the rest of it. That’s where the developers have made their mistake.

        If you have played Dying Light you would see that the devs have learnt a hell of a lot from DI and Riptide. All these mechanisms are present (minus driving! Obviously, they decided they couldn’t get that one right! ;) )but are balanced WAY better.

        1. Ivan says:

          Meh, like I said, it has been a while since I’ve played this game last, and I guess I’ll add to that, that I did not go on to play any of the DLC which really shouldn’t have much of an effect on the game’s review anyway which is (I think) the larger point we’re driving at.

          In any case, yes weapon degradation does encourage scavenging but it was my experience that only the rarer weapons were very effective. I never bothered to pick up white weapons because it felt like my crafted weapons were an order of magnitude superior to them. Because of this I left most of the crap lying where I found it and durability was the most important stat on my meele weapon. I would scavenge but unless something was an upgrade (which was rare) or worth some money I didn’t touch it. As such I spent most of the game struggling with weapons that even though I was doing the best I could with the crafting system to keep them up to date, I always felt I was behind the curve.

          I suppose the real problem here is actually autoleveling. Maybe it was just me, but I didn’t feel that on level whites where anywhere near effective enough to justify their use. If I could have toned down the difficulty or even just followed the game 2 or 3 levels above the quest I was doing then things might have worked out.

          Like I said, the game was a tangled mess of contradictory mechanics and tones. Teasing out exactly what it did wrong is not an easy thing to do. I still blame weapon degradation for most of my gripes with the game, and maybe that has more to do with me constantly comparing it to Borderlands or Diablo, but I really feel that for weapon degradation to be fun then the game really should not attempt in any way to be an RPG. No levels, no stats, I hesitate to even let it have a skill system.

          1. Duoae says:

            That’s fair enough and to be honest multiple people can experience this type of game in different ways (through different character decisions) and also from different viewpoints. YMMV is ever-present in this sort of discussion. I didn’t know there was any DLC and didn’t mention that in my post though so I didn’t think that was a factor in this discussion.

            As for weapon colours, well that’s a staple in any RPG. You start avoiding the white/green/whatever trash items in favour of the more rare examples. The fact that you can repair weapons really easily and cheaply means you don’t have to scavenge so much for them at all.

            I think people are a bit overly hung up on the levelling system. You’re saying it would be better left out… well, having an auto-levelling system is exactly the same as leaving one out. You still get more powerful by having more skills and the enemies are still as dangerous as they would be without varying levels.

            I think the developers (Techland?) might have been better served to hide the level indications on enemies and the player – sort of like they did in Dying Light although to a greater extent – because people are focusing on it as if it’s a problem when the game would be little different as-played if all zombies and players stayed at level 1 but had to gain access to the skills.

            I don’t agree that the game was a contradictory mess of mechanics… storywise and tone-wise it was crap. That we can agree on! :D

            1. Ivan says:

              Ah derp, I thought that Riptide was some DLC for DI that I never bothered looking into. My bad. In any case, if the game don’t think having autoleveling is the same as not having leveling. It might functionally be the same on a lot of points but it puts me in “RPG mode” and then decides we’re not going to be playing an RPG. It may be that the game they made was fun after all, but if they had presented it in a way I could figure out how it was supposed to be played then I might have felt differently about it.

  36. Tuck says:

    Honestly, this game is very pretty. I can’t understand why you guys think it’s so ugly…

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      Motion blur is its biggest downside.Also the field of view isnt impressive,and can cause nausea.

      1. Michael says:

        Motion blur plus the FOV can easily result in nausea even for people not generally prone to simulation sickness. I remember finding the game physically unpleasant to play, for that exact reason.

        Also, the graphics aren’t really that good. This came out the same year as Skryim and Saints Row 3, for reference.

        1. Tuck says:

          I haven’t played Saints Row 3, so I can’t comment on that.

          Skyrim’s graphics never impressed me. Maybe it’s an art direction issue rather than graphics, though. Skyrim is all grey and green and brown, vast areas with little colour variation. Dead Island has colour and depth and light and shadow. Saturation!

  37. Artur CalDazar says:

    I think Dead Island is more polished and offers more, what it’s offering is ultimately not a fantastic execution of a suspect idea, but they are greased enough that the multiplayer aspect lets it go down easy. Survival instinct is relatively unpolished and is a solo experience meaning the game has to sell you on everything by itself.

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