Here's a little rant that I hope will let me vent enough to finish the game, try the other classes, and do a proper review of this game.

Man, fuck Dead Island. It's got good ideas but does them almost entirely wrong. Do you have any fucking idea how hard it is to make something like first person driving in a non-driving game piss me off? Very! I loved driving in Deadly Premonition, and the driving in that is awful! But I HATE the (few times you actually get a chance to do some) driving in Dead Island. Video games: when cars are moving slowly, they can turn around some pretty tight corners. Stop making me understeer like I'm a shitty porche going 200 miles an hour. Also, zombies being more capable of striking you with their fists than you are of hitting them with a weapon that extends your reach up to twice as much? Yeah that's awful. Oh and the spitty zombies, that have way too much health considering how little damage all ranged attacks do? Fuck em. Putting the thing behind a door you have to bash open that blows up in your face and kills you in one hit because when you started to spam the backwards dodge you hit the door jam and couldn't get out in time? Fuck that. I could have loved you. You could have been amazing. But so far the only thing I've really enjoyed, oddly, was shooting at live, human enemies, and even then only I fucking love shooting pistols in video games, and it feels pretty good and has a good sense of physicality.

I don't know how I can hate a game that does so many of the things I love: interesting first person melee combat, zombie apocalypse, first person driving, crafting, RPG elements, sweet raps (well, ok, this is about the only rap I enjoyed on any level, including ironically in about 20 years, so ya know), and juxtaposition of location tropes, especially for a zombie game. But you fail at it all. You put way too much of the game in the shitty city, you give too many enemies to deal with givin the amount of stamina, reach, and arch on your attacks, and include far too many shitty enemies types that take way too long to kill or are way too punishing when you deal with them improperly, you fuck the driving up so bad I'd rather drive around in Deadly Premonition long enough to become intimately familiar with Greenvale's roads than spend another 5 minutes trying to see where the fuck I'm going in Dead Island. Other than having to knock out the glass when it gets fucked up, its the worst driving I've ever experienced.

And man, that story is super awkward when you play alone, and often makes no sense at all, with very little context, if any, given for cutscenes.

Hopefully Day Z gives me a better experience when I try that out, but with the way the idiot who made it is treating it, I doubt by the time I get around to checking it out, it'll be remotely interesting.

Honestly, play Dead Island in the starting area and just stop once you reach the second area (Moresby I believe its called).

@SomeDeliCook said:

Honestly, play Dead Island in the starting area and just stop once you reach the second area (Moresby I believe its called).

Moresby's my favorite part. Just enough zombies to go nuts with the combat, and before the more annoying special zombies are introduced.

=( sigh, hearing stuff like this makes me lean towards not wanting to play this. Hopefully they take into consideration the critique aimed at this game when making the next one.

@BeachThunder said:

=( sigh, hearing stuff like this makes me lean towards not wanting to play this. Hopefully they take into consideration the critique aimed at this game when making the next one.

Being announced about a half a year after the first one, I doubt they had time to really take in fan input. They would have to completely overhaul a lot of the game.

I used to like Techland, but starting with The Cartel I'm starting to dislike them. I really hope Riptide changes my mind

I love love LOVE Dead Island, having finished it multiple times. To me it's great (partly) because of the immense amount of budget fucking jank found throughout it. Plus I found the combat pretty damn satisfying, especially because when using the analogue controls you can turn into a panicky, flailing idiot when shit goes south - it's funny and how you'd really react in that situation!

That said, the reason I stopped playing Dead Island was because I acquired a bug that wouldn't load my game at all - it'd freeze every time, mid-load. So yeah, on that front, fuck Dead Island. But goddamn I've had some bloody fun with that game.

I loved it at first, but the more I played the less I loved it. The gunplay is piss poor, if it was only half as good as the melee combat, I would hold the game in a much higher light. Also, the fact that the story is non-existent doesn't really help. We get it, Borderlands and L4D2 were great hits...but come on.