Dead Island Review

Hits

• Deep RPG Leveling System
• Gory, Bloody, Goodness
• Tons of Replayability
• Expansive/Dangerous Environments
• Seamless Drop In/Drop Out Co-Op

Misses

• Zombies Can Be Overwhelming At Times
• Financial Issues
• Annoying Bosses

 Back in 2006 developer Techland announced a zombie game that would focus primarily on melee and have an expansive game world. Nothing was seen for three and half years until a cinematic trailer featuring a family during the outbreak shook the internet and game world. Although the mood for the game wouldn't be the same as the one in the trailer, people thought that things wouldn't work out for the little zombie game that could. Boy were they wrong.

In theory this game is like Condemned met Left 4 Dead, had babies with Borderlands, and made L4D raise the kids as its own. You have the choice of 4 main characters who each have their own special skill. For instance, Sam B is an expert with blunt weapons which in this game is the equivalent of having Kareem-Abdul-Jabbar in a kiddie pick up game.

"You's A Dead Bitch Now!"For each character there is a different backstory, Sam B for example is a one hit wonder rapper who was brought to the resort to play said one hit wonder. Logan, is a former football star who's career was destroyed by his own ego.

The story takes place on the island of Banoi which is one of the most sought after vacationing locations due to the wealthy and celebrity tourists. You'll explore numerous locales such as the Jungle, a laboratory, and even a city that's literally gone to the dead.

Just because it's a zombie game don't expect the cliche shambling corpses. Techland did a really good job with incorporating different zombies into the game. You have the traditional Romero zombies, the fast 28 Days Later zombies, and you have special zombies. Usually, special zombies are a real lettdown in games like Left 4 Dead due to the implausability of it but here it works surprisingly well. The Ram for example, is essentially an infected human who's in a mental patient gettup. Like his name, his main attack is ramming you so for the love of the Doctor be careful.

Although the gameplay works in terms of smoothness the undead can easily overwhelm you and some can even knock you out in just one punch. I see a lot of broken controllers with cheap shots like this. The weapons work like you'd expect and despite being a pacifist, it's extremely satisfying to lob a head off a zombie like an undead nightmare. That being said, certain weapons you get later on aren't as good as the machetes you can find early on.

 One of the things that Dead Island was promising was a deep crafting system and they delivered on that promise. You have mods such as shock machetes, and even craftable ammo. Despite this, you need to 1. have your weapons at 100% and 2. by the time you get them back to good condition you have almost nothing left.

When you talk about this game you may bring up Dead Rising 1 or 2 but in truth this game is everything Dead Rising wanted to be. You have countless side quests to distract you from the main quest and continuous ones to keep you focused. Certain ones will seem pointless and others on the other hand will be downright difficult.

One of the worst things about this game though is the survivor escort system. Like Dead Rising this games survivor AI isn't that great. The first time they see a zombie they will go crazy or won't even defend themselves when they are being struck by the undead attackers. It's not big enough to break the game or anything but it's something that after a while can be quite frustrating.

The multiplayer for this game was another feature that was heavily anticipated, being able to drop into a game mid-stream is something that is difficult to do these days and Dead Island pulls it off. It can be annoying to have people constantly dropping in but thankfully there's an option for that.

With most of the gameplay feeling like the original Condemned there is unfortunately another thing the game has in common with Condemned: gun mechanics. Oddly, guns aren't that effective against the undead. Even if you shoot them in the head multiple times they will still shamble on towards you.
Eventually, when you encounter certain enemies later on you have boss battles that are extremely frustrating due to the poor gun mechanics. Like the challenge says: "Guns don't work, but they help".

 After 4-5 years in development Dead Island succeeds on most things it promised but others it doesn't quite do well in. The shoddy gun mechanics, poor survivor AI, and frustrating enemy AI really stop Dead Island from shining as one of the greatest games of 2011. With all that said there is enough satisfaction in here to get your moneys worth.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution Review - Comparing The Original

PROS

• Great Environments
• Fun Gameplay
• Good Sound
• Enough Gameplay to Justify the Price
• Multiple Playstyles

CONS

• Forced Into Boss Fights
• Augmentations Are Cluttered and Need Improvement
• Lack of Moral Choices
• Subpar Story
• You Feel "Too Human"
• Zombies

Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the prequel as a sequel!  Deus Ex: Human Revolution is the long awaited sequel to the original Deus Ex, not including Invisible War since that shredded everything Deus Ex.  Human Revolution promised to stay true to the roots of the original, and did it?  Pretty much, but backing up a bit, Human Revolution is set as a prequel back in 2027 when augmentations were still very controversial, but also very noticeable, instead of simple implants there were fully robotic limbs and even sunglasses implanted into your skull.

That atmosphere itself is essentially the Tron Legacy world, except replace any color, except for black, with gold.  And even with the slightly limited color pallet, the game still looks pretty good.  The atmosphere is very well shown, and the side missions and factions help as well.  The only problem I found was when looking at cityscapes or large views; they look very bad, and can lag the game which doesn’t help show the scope of the game world.

May look good on PC, Consoles are another story

Now in the game you play as Adam Jenson, which reminds me of JC and Denton (The name of the character from the original game) smushed together into a last name.  The game plays from your well known first person shooter perspective, though what differs it from the original Deus Ex, is that there is a 3^rd person cover system.  This is where it branches away from how the original Deus Ex played.  In the original, it was completely first person, instead of cover, you would instead lean left and right.  I believe that the developers probably did this to fit consoles, but in my opinion it hindered the game in that it makes it less realistic and less human of a story.

They also got rid of health packs in favor of the infamously hated “Wait to wipe blood off face” health system.  As much as I hate games that use this, I believe it was again an improvement made for console gamers, and it actually works, more or less.  You can also takes stimulants to temporarily increase your health, so I’m surprised to say this isn’t bad, but leads back to a much bigger problem I will talk about a bit later.

Augmentations, a staple of Deus Ex are also back, with a much more RPG-esque system, while also replacing skills (which means no swimming).  The biggest problem with this is that especially at the beginning of the game, the augmentation screen is very intimidating.  It essentially just throws 20 icons in your face, each representing a different set of augmentations which at the beginning can be very confusing, because you don’t know what to get, what will help you, and you also have a fear of not wanting to waste your limited XP, since over the course of the game, you won’t get all the augmentations.  The system itself is pretty expansive, and covers inventory space, social upgrades, jumping and speed increased, less damage, seeing through walls, etc.  One thing I like about these is they aren’t all directly related to a stat, such as there aren’t ones that specifically upgrade damage, but they are more focused around serving purposes, and that’s exactly what they do.

Wanna kill 2 people at once? There's an Aug for that

Now, the second fault is that they essentially combined the skills and augmentations from the original into one system.  Now, I believe they probably did this to dumb it down a bit, now this is exactly what happened with Invisible War, they dumbed it down to the point where it was just a First Person Shooter, which isn’t what Deus Ex is.  Now, this didn’t dumb it down THAT much, but it still took away some of the core aspects of Deus Ex.  Experience was used to upgrade your actual person, just like how having experience in real life makes you better at things.  While upgrades were limited to how many you could get while still catering to gameplay; you could explore and find them in hidden places, hack your way into safes, or you could simply buy them.  This also combated what I mentioned before, which is feeling overloaded with options, each augmentation canister you found gave you a simple “this or that” choice, which is a much better way to do it.

Now, onto what Deus Ex is famous for, the story!  The game has an average plot set in a vivid world, but I never really thought there was a climax, which is important to most games, I also didn’t feel the same sense of conspiracy and betrayal I felt in the original.  So overall, to sum it up, the story is meh.  It’ll be enough to keep some people playing, but not for others.  But what will keep people playing is how despite everything I’ve said, the gameplay is still fun, and there is still the famous Deus Ex blend of stealth, action, and exploration.

Now, onto that one problem which I have been relating to this whole review; the game makes you feel more than human.  One thing which I personally enjoyed about the original, above all else, was how the main character felt human.  He died from a headshot, a shotgun blast pointblank would destroy him, and without regenerating health, a bad injury would affect gameplay, such as a leg being broken and etc.  The health packs in the game helped make it a much more human game.  You also couldn’t easily kill 5 people unless you had a rocket launcher and they were huddling in one point having an orgy on the job or something, you had to use strategy and stealth to take enemies out one at a time, threats felt more…threatening.  I personally went through Human Revolution killing everyone, in the original there is no way I’d be able to survive some things I did in this game because you are more than human, regenerating health, deadly and abusive weapons, and some abusive upgrades simply made you seem more than human, which throws out everything the original did well.  Especially without actual skills, this is the game’s biggest fault, and it’s that it fell into the trap set by modern day games, and that’s making the player feel more than human.  Yes, I know there is the hardest difficulty, but all that means is you’ll be camping and waiting for health to heal more instead of crawling in vents.  Now I’m not saying there were augmentations in the original such as one that allowed you to take 30 bullets, but it was not only implemented much better than augmentations in Human Revolution, the upgrading took time, and you still took damage which could only heal by itself with a special augmentation, which you couldn’t have active all the time.

You'll probably live...

Which reminds me, another fault I found was limiting the player to one bar of energy without food, it made the energy upgrades more useless and it doesn’t help the feel of the game, only being able to look through walls for 10 seconds, over being able to use it in combat is a big difference and may have made combat a bit more enjoyable.  Now that isn’t the only problem of the game mind you, the AI is less than stellar, which I guess is one of the things that does live up to the original.  Now, moral choices were a pretty big deal in the original, but another problem in Human Revolution is that a lethal or non-lethal path doesn’t really change anything.  I went through the game killing everyone; I swore that when I killed over half of the Detroit police force I would get my ass handed to me…but not a word.  In this game the moral choice is simply limited to the player, or more importantly, what guns you have ammo for.  There isn’t an army general to scream at you for killing people, the game doesn’t question your morals for killing civilians, which is a missed opportunity if nothing else.  Now the last thing I’m going to rage on is how they brag about how you can talk to people and find alternate paths, when in reality the game forces you to try conversations and if you fail you then have to take an alternate path, it honestly isn’t an option which again doesn’t help the game live up to the original, because you are supposed to have to look for easier paths, not have them handed to you on a silver platter while having someone ask you if you’d like some melted butter with that.

This dude WILL piss you off by the end of the game

Now is a great time to point out that I lied, I have one more big problem about the game to address.  The game at times forces you into boss fights which are frankly unnecessary.  Having boss fights breaks the flow of the game for someone who focuses on stealth or hacking, because it forces you into unavoidable combat situations, not only that, but they are simply unfair, and one person who can take 10 bullets to the head without a drop of blood doesn’t belong in Deus Ex because that’s “Too Human” which I guess would make sense knowing that your character is also an abusive badass.  Now, I know the original Deus Ex forced you into a few boss fights, but they at least allowed you to use your surrounding somewhat, while some other were avoidable, or had ways to cheat them.  In the original I kept dying from one augmented boss, so I looked around before confronting her again, found a rocket launcher, and shot her into 1000 pieces.  This game may have had a bit of that, but not as much since the boss fights themselves take place in compact areas without people to talk to for help and what not.  And lastly, the boss fights take place in tight places with no open world-ness to them, at least in the original I could run my pussy ass away, in this one; you are getting spammed by so many bullets you’d be lucky to move from one side of the room to the other while still staying alive.

Now, to recap since this review got much longer than I initially expected; the game tries its best to live up to the original, and is better than Invisible War.  It has good level design as well as good music and is great at enriching you with atmosphere.  But, the story itself is subpar and moral choices of killing people have no impact on the game.  The gameplay makes you feel more than human, which doesn’t live up to the original, and the “Choose your path” gameplay is there, but it could be much better, specifically where dialog is concerned.  If you are new to the Deus Ex series, you definitely should check this out, but if you are looking for a true Deus Ex sequel, play the Deus Ex mod “The Nameless Mod” instead.