Dead Island delivers dark, fun action in single- and multiplayer

Dead Island takes place on a beautiful tropical island, and you are tasked with taking control of one of four characters to do your best to survive an outbreak of zombies. The game features a wide-open world to explore, but while it may be constantly compared to other games like Dead Rising, it successfully manages to feel like its own game. I've had the chance to play the single-player game, as well as take the four-player co-op play for a test drive, and I've enjoyed both.

While the game is still struggling to come out from under the shadow of its first trailer, we need to look at what the game delivers, not what we had speculated based on that short film. The truth of Dead Island is that the game is fun, and it manages to juggle the horror of the situation with a light-hearted sense of play. It sounds weird, but it works.

Two different ways to play

The game changes depending on how you'd like to play. When I was alone in the single player game I enjoyed the more deliberate pace, and I rejected the few missions available during the demo to simply explore the island and play with the many improvised weapons while killing every zombie I saw. There is a heavy emphasis on melee weapons in this game, which means that the zombies get very close to you, and that's a nerve-wracking experience. It takes practice before you can judge the reach of the many weapons, but soon enough you'll be chopping off heads and legs, or taking out the shambling horrors with thrown weapons.

Don't worry, once the zombie is dead you can pull out that ax and use it again. So that's nice. There are guns, but ammo is at a premium, so you'll want to use them sparingly while doing the majority of your attacks with knives and blunt objects. You'll also be able to upgrade your weapons at workbenches to create deadlier items.

Dead Island

When you play with more people—up to three other players can drop in and out at will—the number of zombies is increased, and the result is a game that leans more toward action than survival horror. Working together with friends to take down the zombies while sharing items and weapons is a very good time, even if I was playing with someone in PR and another writer. 

This is what a game demo should be: we were all sitting in comfortable chairs, leaning back, and just talking about the game. There was no hard sell, we just all grabbed controllers and went to work. Zombies were slain, trash talk began, and I enjoyed the more frantic pace of the game. We discussed which weapons we were using and why, and we delighted when someone killed a zombie in a particularly bloody way.

While the game veers towards the serious, it's an oddly fun battle for life and death. The game plays very differently when you add more players, but that's a good thing, and the ability to invite a friend into my game at any point is a major selling point. I keep thinking that I'm bored with co-op zombie games, but Dead Island has enough personality and variation on the idea to make me excited about playing more.

Dead Island is coming to the PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 on September 6.