Rating of
3/5
"Dead Island"
Megadrive - wrote on 05/30/19
The Elder Scrolls meets Resident Evil in this sandbox RPG set during a zombie apocalypse on a tropical island. It's a well engineered game with plenty to do, but like a lot of games of this type there's little more to it than blowing away zombies and looting the environment for useful items. The narrative thread running through it isn't really strong enough and the copious number of side missions can often fall by the wayside by sheer weight of numbers. It also has the deeply irritating "respawn when you die" formula which means that when you meet a particularly tough enemy or get low on ammo you just have to keep getting killed, trudge your way back from the respawn point and get killed again over and over, until you beat them through sheer attrition which can get pretty tedious. It does get better as it goes and opens up new areas and particularly new weapons as the firearms are much more fun than the endless bludgeoning of the earlier levels. Worth it for the best bits but the lack of variety and niggles prevent it from being an essential purchase.
