Dead Island

Note: I've only given this game a short amount of play time (roughly about 30 minutes) and this is my feelings on what I saw and played through. Played this on Xbox 360...

For starters, the game play itself seems to function pretty well, nothing really overly complicated about it. The fights with the zombies can end up being pretty chaotic from what I saw as well. If you happen to pull away from the people you are playing with and happen upon a group of zombies scattered on the ground (a lot of 'em are playing dead... ha ha), the game is pretty much over. I've found myself a few times swinging away for my life, only to see the stamina gauge run out and I was pretty much attacked/eaten/mauled to death. 

Team work? At least in this limited amount of time I've played it, generally does not exist. Sure there were moments where my randomly selected "partners" would gang up together and attack the same zombies. But more often then not, I'd find these guys were long gone and reaping the rewards (money, items, weapons) while I was stuck with dealing with the mess. Maybe I was just doing things all wrong? Still, I think this is yet another game where it would probably work out better if you played with friends.

Speaking of which, sadly there isn't any options for any split screen co-op to be had in here. There doesn't seem to really be any options, other then to play with either your friends or randomly selected people over Xbox Live. 

The story itself? Well obviously there are a ton of questions and next to no answers as to how and why there are zombies in paradise. There are different characters to choose from (3 or 4 if I recall correctly) and I picked the martial arts girl. Did it help? Well my first encounter with zombies/infected ended up with me throwing punches, taking none of them out and pretty much dying.

Damn.

Everything changed once I got a hold of a weapon (a paddle) and the weapons seem much more durable then I thought they'd be (kept reading how annoying it was how these weapons break so much). Money wasn't too much of an issue at the start, so when I finally got around to making repairs and upgrades to my weapons it wasn't bank breaking. Then again, how much could it possibly cost to repair a crappy pipe and a knife anyway?

Overall, the game doesn't seem that bad at the start and the game play is good enough to where combat and movement aren't really that awkward. The surroundings are pretty nice, though I can't really say the same for the story itself. I'd hope that picks up as the game progresses... but being that it is a game set in a zombie apocalypse, story never really was a strong suit to begin with I suppose.

Still, I think I'd consider on playing this again...