E3 2011: Dead Island (Xbox 360) Preview

Posted by Jeffrey Harris on 06.23.2011

Hands On: Take a tropical vacation where you are the finest cuisine. 411mania.com gets an exclusive look at Dead Island at E3.

Let's face it. Zombies are the in thing right now. Whether it is ginchy t-shirts, movies, comics, books like World War Z, or hit TV shows like The Walking Dead, people are going nuts over the living dead. And there is certainly no shortage of the living dead in video games either between the Resident Evil franchise, Dead Rising, and many more. Now recently you might have seen the nightmare fuel that were the trailers for a little game called Dead Island:



And part two of course:



So at E3, 411mania.com finally got the chance to sit down and play the game. This is a first person shooter, open world game. There is a heavy online multiplayer co-op aspect to the game which was how it was played. You get to play from a group of characters are stranded in a church on the titular "Dead Island" a vacation spot that has been overrun by a plague of the undead. At the church you can pick up items as well as weapons. There are stations in the church where you can repair your weapons as well as customize them. You see you can take a machete and put some wires on it and make it electrically charged to give it a little extra bang. You can make knines that you throw explosive so they can blow up zombies that much better.

Once you are all set up, you move out of the church safehouse and start on your quest with your group. I like the teamwork element of the gameplay. You have to work in tandem with your group to ward off zombies and complete special tasks. One such tasks is putting up bulletin posters to notify survivors to get to the church. There are various zombies all over the place in this sandbox world. The environment is highly interactive. There are tons of tools and additional weapons.

The one element I don't like is the repair element of your weapons. After using your weapons a certain amount of time they fail and break down. Now I do like the stamina meter and you have to be careful about how much you dash or run as well as bash zombies, so you can't just button mash or melee the hell out of your character with your weapons. Each character you can play as has their own special skills and attributes. There are different types of zombies as well. Also after you kill your enemies you can search their bodies for items and extra cash. You will need cash to buy new weapons, upgrades, items, and weapon repairs.



Dead Island was developed by Techland and will be published by Deep Silver on PS3 and Xbox 360. It is currently set for a release this September.