iGamerz – XGE

So yesterday Dead Island came out and I’ve done NOTHING but play it since then. At first I had mixed feelings about it because I was so used to Treyarch’s fast paced action in their zombie maps, but after further game time I can say this….THIS GAME IS AWESOME!!!

So basically it goes a little something like this… Your on an island called Banoi which is off the coast of New Guinea on a vacation. After a night of heavy drinking, you wake up to find that the island is in chaos. Everyone is infected with some blood disease that turns them into zombies. You can choose from 4 characters who are all immune to the disease, and you go around to the survivors to do missions for them because they don’t want to get infected… otherwise I suppose they’d do the missions themselves. The missions vary anywhere from picking up supplies for survivors, to offing someone’s infected wife and kid so they don’t have to suffer… all this while fighting hoards of zombies.

The zombies are a mix between George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead zombies in that they’re very slow, to 28 Days Later zombies which are insanely fast. There are some special zombies which are almost always harder to kill. As your xp goes up, so does theirs. So if your on level 23, the zombies are on level 23-24.

There are endless weapons in this game. You can kill with a broomstick or a kitchen knife… but later in the game you get guns which are very helpful. Ammo for the guns is scarce so it must be used wisely. You can modify weapons as you progress in the game, and even electrify certain weapons.

This game has EVERYTHING. Not only that, it’s FAR from cheap. No not money cheap (because it did cost me $64 big ones) but it’s fair. Actually, sometimes it’s too fair. That’s never a bad thing though. When you die, you start right where you left off and the zombies stay with the health you left them off at before you ate the big one.

One thing to keep in mind is that this is not a fast paced first person shooter. It’s a well balanced first person RPG. It’s fast at times, but for the most part you’ll be trying to complete little side missions while either trying to avoid the undead, or going face to face with them.

The fighting is a bit choppy at times and can sometimes be difficult to master because of the delay. For example, when your trying to stab a zombie it’s not an automatic response so you have to time everything perfectly. Fighting one zombie is easy, but fighting five is hard. Some zombies sprint and some are very slow. Some are big and some are small. There’s these big guys called Thugs that have a lot of experience points that take a lot of work to take down.

There’s SOOOOOO much going on in this game that a simple review wouldn’t give it justice. One thing is for sure… this game is BIG!!! I’m talkin HUGE!!! It’s certainly worth buying and I highly recommend it for those who are fans of the genre.