Dead Island offers a pretty decent take on the zombie genre. It's very much RPG in style and can offer several hours worth of content but it is still very much a deeply flawed game.
Out of all the main and side missions this game has to offer, Virtually all of them are fetch quests and believe me, Nothing is more repetitive than having to constantly run back and forth between objectives the entire game. Especially when there's a real lack of fast travel stations, That simply adds to the annoyance IMO.
And on top of that, We aren't really given much of a story here. It's all pretty bland and doesn't offer anything original, I've seen very similar plots in plenty of zombie films and games before. NPCs aren't really a factor here either. They just give you the simple side quest with no real dialogue outside of that. You can't even interact or have dialogue choices with any of the characters throughout the game. That, I feel, is a major flaw. It would have been cool to get to know some of these characters, Who are stuck in the same awful situation you are in.
As for the gameplay, It's very similar to how Left 4 Dead was. It's your typical hack and slash with some minor RPG elements added in (such as skill tree, level based weapons that are upgradable and customizable). It's fun, don't get me wrong, but much like everything else in the game, It's repetitive.
Other minor things I noticed: Visually, It's not as sharp or as defined as I would hope but it doesn't look terrible. Crafting stuff can be fun but feels underdeveloped. There is a fair share of bugs and glitches, A little bit of lag as well. It's very easy to get swarmed by enemies in this game and that can lead to some very cheap and annoying deaths so you definitely have to know when to pick your battles and when to fun. The multiplayer helps take some of the stress off when fighting characters but it isn't as fun as it could have been.
Overall: 5/10
What would have made Dead Island better? Sharper graphics, More variety in the mission objectives, Interactable NPCs and a more fleshed out story that doesn't try to nail every single zombie trope out there. It's not a terrible game but it's definitely half-baked.
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