Dead Island

[Appel]

So its nearly here.

My Steam copy is being preloaded as we speak.

IGN described it to be similar to a Fallout 3 zombie game. Is this good or bad?

Mostly melee combat? Will this lead to survival horror portions of the game?

Who else is excited for this?
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[A13x]

Mine's preloaded.

5 days, 17 hours to go.

• Open World
• Zombies
• Co-op
• Tropical Paradise (disregard undead)
• RPG Elements
• Weapon Customisation
• Aussie Accent

What more could you want from a game?

Dead Rising got me all excited the second I tried the demo. I must have played that demo twenty times, just exploring, looking for weapons, and destroying zombies with EVERYTHING. It was fantastic.

Then I bought the game.

Ew.

Years later, and upon receiving Dead Rising 2 as a gift, I tried that. Played for 30 minutes, and remembered why I hated the first. It was an open world game, but it required you to do exactly what it wanted, it made you go where it wanted, and if you didn't, it would punish you with GAME OVER.

Hope to god that this is a lot less restrictive (Fallout 3 style? Yes please).

I enjoyed Killing Floor and L4D/2, but the same small levels get boring fast, and something as vast and open as a tropical island without time limits and corridor shooter syndrome will be a welcome change for the genre.

Plus it sort of reminds me of that cool ARMA II Zombie mode video...
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<3

[RAMPAGE]

Im waiting for the reviews to hit the street. The preview IGN did makes it sound like it might be a winner but who knows.

[Zhou]

Darn you hip kids with steam bought copies. I'll need to wait another 4-5 days for the EB copy. Waiting for the CE with the turtle beach headset
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My flickr
i7 930 | 6gb ddr3 Ripjaws 2000 | GTX 560 | 1tb 7200rpm WD |

[Windburn]

I bit.

Pre-ordered over at GMG, looking forward to another zombie slay.
If it even approaches 'putting the fear back in zombie games' that the IGN review alludes to, it'll be worth it.

Just can't get enough of zombie co-op titles!
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[ShortRaver]

GameTrailers review.

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Playing: Fallout: New Vegas

[ShortRaver]

[Fetidchimp]

[Cyph]

I've heard it is much like Borderlands, which sounds awesome to me!

[mrcool37]

So I'm just starting to look into this game now, and wondering what the cheapest prices out there are?

I just found a deal on Greenmangaming where the game can be had for $33.95 pre-loaded.

Dead Island - $33.95

http://www.greenmangaming.com/

Promo Code - "READY-UPDEA-ISLAN"

[A13x]

Heads up all, it's out in the US.

Unlock your pre-loads via VPN.

Playing now, will leave impressions later tonight.
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<3

[Jarrod]

They uploaded a dev build to Steam instead of the finished release.

smh
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[Windburn]

[Karai Pantsu]

The Steam build has been patched and should be good to go. From GameInformer:

[El Taco]

I went into EB Games today, and it's out! I've ordered mine from the Big W sale yesterday so I have to wait
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R.I.P Tanya

[Windburn]

[kartanym]

Bought it at work today, heard about the steam issue so I figured buying the disc was worth the lack of hassle. Everyone at work had it predownloaded, had a bit of a chuckle at that.

[A13x]

Ok so I'm a day or too late on impressions, but hey I'm lazy.

Anyway, It's good. It isn't a AAA game by any means, and has some initial rough edges, but it's likable. It's been said many times, but it's Borderlands. On an Island. With Zombies.

I have restarted the campaign from chapter 2 after the save game debacle, I lost progress on most of the quests I had done, but it didn't really annoy me, I've since explored a few areas I did not venture to first time around, and have done a lot of different quests.

Combat is brutal and satisfying, though outside of the rage mode activation I've not used a firearm, and I managed to pick one up on my first save as a quest reward but I was too low level to equip it at the time.

A good example of the fun combat is as follows. I approach a gas station, an undead black dude in a red tshirt and white shorts stands upright and moves away from the body he was chewing on as he sees me, he begins to scream, and sprints towards me. I'm standing near the bottom of a hill, admiring the scenery, aware of, but not bothered by the approaching screamer, as he gets to within 2m, I kick him in the face, delivering a critical hit and 100 damage. He falls backwards down the hill, I walk over calmly, and end him with a fierce iron pipe to the head, the top half explodes into chunks and his body lands limply on my awesome new shoes.

Zombies aren't always clever, I guess that's why they hunger for my brain, but their misfortune can be taken advantage of for a cheap laugh, lure a pack of zombies into a pool, jump the wall to stand above them, watch as they desperately grab at your ankles. Throw a molotov at them. Then stand back, sip one of the bottles of Alcohol you have been stockpiling, and enjoy the carnage.

Now I've not yet put time into multiplayer, as I'm waiting on more people I know to have the game, Pudding's still needing to download it, and I'm guessing most of the guys on here are not using VPN to play it yet.

Unless you tell the game you want to be forever alone, it will default to drop in/drop out online, where if you are near another player's location, the game lets you know this, and you can press J to join their game. I had someone do this to me early on.



The dude joined my game, said hi, asked how to use voice chat, I hit them with the pipe, then they left. So I guess I lied, I did try coop, but it was too short of an experience to judge it, and I will do so once I have played online with people while chatting with them on Vent to strategise and such.


So much win in so little space

Running zombies over is pretty classy also, you could spend half a minute punching and kicking and swinging a broken weapon at a zombie, or you could flatten it like a meat pancake in a fraction of a second with a fantastic utility vehicle.

The island itself is pretty big, from what I've seen, you cannot walk around the entire island, it's more like you have access to a quarter of the total landspace, but this is still a huge area, and it takes time on foot to travel as you'll be fighting off undead the whole time. There's lots of cool little coastal caves and incentives to explore.


RIP noclip, I'll miss you :'(

The characters do feel a bit robotic, it is NPCs that I have spend my time talking with, not other players, but the animation is not super fluid. Compared to something like Deus Ex: Human Rev, it is a bit of a step back, but it's pretty amusing at the same time.

The Quests have been pretty varied so far, with basic sidequests like collecting bottles of alcohol for an alcoholic guy too scared to come out the the poolside bar he's taking refuge in, to looking for a lady's missing husband, to things like driving to a petrol station, turning on the power to the fuel pumps and filling jerry cans with petrol for burning bodies back at base camp.


She wants her teddybear, but you have other ideas.

Now as you kill zombies and complete quests, you get XP, guess what happens to you when you get enough XP?

...

Nope, good guess, but the correct answer is, YOU LEVEL UP!

Now leveling up is not all about ePenis measurements and number comparisons with your buddies. It actually serves another purpose too!
Every time you level, you are given a perk point to spend, now that's not their actual name, but I prefer my name for it. There are 3 perk trees upon which you can perk your perks. Rage, Combat and Survival. Each of these perk trees give you access to abilities that will go a long way assisting you in your quest to stab and kick at zombies.

Rage is an attack based tree, that gives you access to a rage bar, the more living-challenged you destroy, the closer your rage bar is to exploding. Once filled, you can violently press the Z key on your keyboard to go into a bullet-time esque sequence where you can shoot at and slash your foes with excessive force.

The Combat tree improves gunplay and melee weaponry, so that the rare knife with 150 damage that you picked up will be able to perform its thing on more than a handful of zombies before being made redundant and spending it's retirement lodged in the forehead of a rotting corpse.

Survival perks tend to help out with things like your endurance bar running out in the middle of a heated physical debate, and such. They also help you carry more weapons in your active inventory so you always have just the right tool at just the right time.


F*** YEAH! SIXTEEN DOLLARS!!

Weapons are not exactly rare, though some are, and these have green, blue or yellow names, yes, like Borderlands. You often find storage chests with these stronger and more valuable items being found inside on some occaisions, like Borderlands.

Unlike Borderlands, you collect lots of crap, bits of wire, duct tape, nails, all sorts of seemingly useless stuff, but once you learn how, you can take your backpack of crap to a workbench and use it to craft new weapons (like Fallout!), you can also use all that hard earned cash that you stole from those dead people's luggage to buy yourself weapon upgrades, or to repair that really neat level 9 stick that you have become emotionally attached to.


They laughed at my glasses. I laughed at their screams.

But yeah, forgiving a few rough edges (YOU MADE ME PLAY AN IN DEV BUILD!), and a slightly frustrating weapon degradation system, I have been having great fun, zombies are pretty great, and I'm thanking a higher being for not implementing a system where you have to deliver a cure for being undead, called ZOMBREX to your friend's little sister's friend once every 30 minutes or you WILL get a GAME OVER.

TL;DR If you like killing things with a baseball bat, this game was made for you.
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<3

[Puddingfork]

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Unofficial PALGN Ventrilo Server 203.14.173.58:5704

[TheAnswer]

I noticed in my 360 Collectors Edition that the X11 headsets had been changed to the X12 headsets and there was a little note in the set mentioning the change and whats new in the X12 compared to the X11 so not bad at all.
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RIP Buddha 19/10/1952 - 03/01/2004


Buy video games for cheap here: http://www.play-asia.com/SOap-23-83-3hy3-49-en.html

[Zhou]

re: the annie looking for her teddy bear.. a league of legends reference?

I'll be picking up my PC Collectors ed a bit later.
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My flickr
i7 930 | 6gb ddr3 Ripjaws 2000 | GTX 560 | 1tb 7200rpm WD |

[Windburn]

For those of you that haven't done much reading, know that the class system in Dead Island is pretty well thought out too.

Unlike L4D (which reviews are mentioning ad nauseum for some silly reason), each of the four characters have very different playstyles and abilities. In fact, the character setup is more akin to WoW or your traditionally MMO than anything else.

You have Sam B who is your man's man: ie. the tank. His skills allow him to take a lot of up-front damage, to generate threat, and to crowd control like a boss. He is a blunt weapons expert and gets some bonus' to firearms too later on. His fury mode allows him to uppercut enemies Street Fighter style, to the point where he smacks them sky high at later levels, keeping them out of action.

Then you have Purna, your firearms expert. Since firearms are less of a feature in DI than in other games, she also has access to skills that improve her slicing and melee (if I remember right), but her main focus is her fury ability which allows her to dispatch multiple enemies from the very start with her 'private gun' (read: accessible only in fury mode).

Next you have Xian, the assassin. She's more stealthy as her skills allow her to reduce threat levels, and she gets big bonus' for her backstabbing. She also can cause much DoT damage by slicing and dicing (bleed) and poisoning her blades. She also gets a shot at instantly killing enemies with her blades if you choose that path. Her fury mode allows her to go to town with critical, decapitating, limb-loosening hits.

Finally, we have Logan. The one that most people will go for no doubt (which is why I kept him last). He's the throwing weapon expert, and his final skill in that tree allows him to retrieve (in-tact) 50% of thrown weapons from bodies that he kills. He's also a bit of an all-rounder, getting bonus' to blunt and blade weapons if he so likes. His fury mode allows him to dispatch multiple enemies with knives, so he's a bit of an AOE guy too.

All of the characters have passives somewhere on their trees to increase durability of their preferred weapons, as well as to reduce wear on select weapons (these are usually interchangeable, with similar effects, so one character doesn't get both).

Stamina management is also a bit of a deal, as you can't be taking blows and raining them without it draining. So some of the up-front and personal types have various stamina and health regen bonus'.


That's about it, hopefully I've summarised them accurately from the short couple of hours I've had to play with the respective classes
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[Lucretia]

collectors edition pre order only?
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[Windburn]

Just a heads up for those starting to play Dead Island today:

You may notice that when you try to strafe, it appears that walking is delayed and jittery. It has been discovered that this is a result of the game erroneously firing off a whole bunch of movement commands (as if you were tapping rapidly on the key instead of holding it).

To fix this in the interim, until an official fix for it is released, do the following:

[emwearz]

After playing for awhile it feels like Farcry 2 but with Zombies.