Super Nerd Sunday Presents: Leaving Dead Island!

So two weeks ago I wrote about Dead Island, flush with joy over playing a new game with new zombies and lots of new mechanics in it. I was excited to see what would come of it, how the game would take shape and how the end game might carry through the amazing shifts that I’d seen in the portions I’d already played through. I’d stumbled through much of Moresby at that point, but there was a lot of game to come. More than I’d expected, really. And not all of it was great.

See Dead Island loses much of its panache when it enters the jungle and prison settings, essentially the third and fourth acts of the game. But it’s not helpful just to tell you that: let me try to explain just what my problem with each of these places was. Because my issue was not with the mechanics of Dead Island, nor was it that the system of resource management at play in the resort and Moresby suddenly dissipated. My issue was that the way that these areas were structured started to work against Dead Island, started to make it feel drawn out rather than short, punchy and exciting.

Take the jungle, for example. Initially it’s actually pretty interesting – a sparse, almost resourceless environ filled with big empty spaces and small, densely populated spaces filled with hordes of enemies, enemies that will run you down without a second thought. But then you’re taken out of that jungle’s village environment and brought into a laboratory setting, a laboratory setting where you are sent on a series of “fetch quests” that would’ve been grating if there’d been half as many of them. As it stands, by the end of the lab portion I was ready for the game to be over: a cast of characters is introduced and annihilated, imbued with unearned qualities and shoved to the side the moment it becomes narratively convenient to do so. The dense, tense, exploratory gameplay that I’d loved was shaped into an infuriatingly dull “quest and return” model that would’ve been at home in an MMO, where I ran outside of a lab structure and ran back in as convenient. By the time I reached the prison, which utilized the same sort of level structure, I was ready for the game to be over.

It’s not that repetition is necessarily a bad thing. Odd as it might sound, repetition with a purpose can be great. Well utilized and well thought out repetition can actually make a game. Just look at Halo, Modern Warfare, and Starcraft. These games all play on making a short, enjoyable piece of repetitive action the core of their game. Dead Island inverts the structure by making tedium the focus towards the end of the game: it removes us from the frenetic, objective oriented play we have grown accustomed to, the desperate scrabble for supplies that we spend much of our time pursuing that dominates our time early in the game, and replaces it with a structure where we are literally running errands for scientists who turn out to be stealth racists and incredibly annoying prison inmates who, let’s face it, after you kill the first horde of zombies besetting them, should probably catch on to the fact that you’re a lot tougher than they are and shut their fucking pie holes.

But perhaps these ills could be forgiven if the payoff was high enough, if the ending was profound enough. But it isn’t. It’s difficult to form a challenging climax in a zombie game that doesn’t draw heavily from Left 4 Dead’s Finale mode, and if you skew from this model of sudden, overwhelming odds you risk making a game that it is either too easy or frustratingly hard. Dead Island goes the second route, forcing you to fight in an enclosed space with a superzombie who combines all the worst qualities of all the most annoying zombies in the game. He charges at you, incredibly quickly, cannot be knocked down and takes way too many bullets to finish off. And he emerges from a non-sense plot point, one so central to the story of the game and so simultaneously ridiculous that it nearly undid all of the goodwill that I’d arrayed towards Dead Island after its stunningly well constructed first two chapters.

Much of this can be blamed on the writing: the first few chapters are character light. Aside from Sinamoi, Jin and a very serious nun who does not fly, not even a once, there really aren’t many prominent characters. But the latter portion of the game rapidly expands the cast of “core characters” to include a rogues gallery of characters who, while initially somewhat complex, rapidly spiral into plot-device-nonsense territory. Most of them are killed off screen by the end of the game, a crime in zombie fiction where the kill is a kind of payoff, but understandable given how the pacing of the game begins to lag towards the end. If we actually saw each character die, if we had to kill their zombified form (as you know you want to, even if you love a character) then the game would easily stretch for another five to ten hours. It’s already too long as it stands, and this is a game meant to be replayed – making it overlong feels almost criminal to me already.

But I’d be lying if I said all the joy was gone. Killing zombies never actually gets old, and there’s a constant flow of new toys that doesn’t let up. Even at the end of the game you’re being given new tools to eradicate the zombie menace – arguably too many, since you’re trying to learn to use them while fighting off waves of infected that charge at you. And you get to bring these toys with you when you restart the game, which you’ll almost certainly do. How could you not? Those beautiful Banoi beaches, those harsh Moresby streets – how can you not love those moments? How can you not want to relive them with the fancy toys you find at the day’s edge? How can you walk away from machete play like this?

So in the end, I still think Dead Island is a great game – I might even call it a flawed masterpiece. While I can imagine someone doing a first person zombie RPG better, I can’t imagine anyone making a more visceral, sensible or informed one than Dead Island. And, honestly, I cannot imagine that theoretical first person zombie game ever being made. So if you’re still on the fence about Dead Island, check it out. It’s not perfect, sure. But you’ll get a lot of fun out of it and, worst case scenario, you can get a few friends together for the later portion of the game and maybe, if you’re lucky, breeze through the more boring quests a little quicker with their help.