Dead Island

pro

The beautiful open world encourages exploration. The varied environments is reminiscent of the mysterious island from the TV show Lost and has a great surreal atmosphere. While the first part of the game takes place on the gorgeous resort area the best is still to come.

pro

The drop in/drop out 4 player co-op is how the game really should be played. The combat shines when you face hordes of zombies, taking turns clubbing or chopping them down. You can trade weapons and items with each other which will help you tailor stuff to your character or construct that new lethal weapon mod.

pro

The brutal melee combat mechanics are gruesomely satisfying and addictive. When you swing your weapon your stamina meter will drop and ultimately rendering you unable to fight off the zombies. This creates tension throughout the game no matter how powerful your weapons are. Even though you can get firearms pretty early on, they are not very effective against the walking dead and ammunition is sparse.

pro

Action-RPG fans will be satisfied with the numerous loot scattered around the world. You will constantly spend your hard earned cash repairing degradable weapons but once you've built that wicked electric mod for your catana blade you won't think twice about it. While you level up your character you can also assign different perks from a skill-tree which gives you something extra to look forward to next to the actual quests rewards.

pro

Driving feels good and serves as a fun distraction in between missions and speeds up travel between quests significantly.

con

The game itself doesn't live up to the fantastic announcement trailer released by Techland months before the release. While the game holds up on it's own I can't let go of the hypothetical mental image of what the game could have been.

con

The story is campy and the stereotypical, stiff characters and NPCs doesn't help create a realistic, believable world. It feels more akin to a heavily scripted daytime soap opera than a matter of life and death and results in no emotional attachment to your character at all. This being said, you will still be hooked by the varied and entertaining quests.

con

The cookie trail showing your way to the next way-point in your current quest is occasionally really buggy which leads to some frustration when trying to find your way on the mini map. Also you can't switch to a side-quest when your main quest is active which seems like an odd decision. Other bugs include some really strange respawn points where you end up on a completely different place than where you died, and at times even surrounded by a horde of blood thirsty zombies. Since you loose cash every time you die this can be really annoying. The game also suffers from freezing your PS3 and you will simple have to reboot it a couple of times during your play-through. This tends to happen more often while driving.

con

The enemy zombie character models are not very detailed. This might be a trade-off due to the fact that you can actually chop off or incapacitate individual limbs, which is super fun!