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Back to Banoi. I'm giving Dead Island a second chance.
13 years ago
General
So yeah, I've spent the past few nights playing Dead Island again. Partially this is because I'm getting tired of playing Champions Onilne and can't get up the energy to get back into WoW until Mists of Pandaria comes out, partially this is because I'm out of money and can't afford to buy any new games, and partially it's because I've been reading these two webcomics lately...
Dead Winter: http://deadwinter.cc/
The Zombie Hunters: http://www.thezombiehunters.com/index.php
Good stuff, but yeah, lately I've been in a zombie mood and Left 4 Dead isn't any fun unless the rest of my pack is around to play it with me, so I decided to return to the lush, tropical, zombie-infested island of Banoi.
They have made a few changes to the game that I've noticed. For one, it seems to be a lot less stingy with healing items than before. Also there are more checkpoints (or at least it seems that way) and overall it's a lot less frustrating to get around than it was last time.
Mind you, I do still have some gripes. In Act 2 you're still more or less screwed if you come up against a suicider (-exactly- what it sounds like) and don't have a bomb or gun handy then you're stuck either throwing one of your melee weapons (by this point almost certainly a valuable upgraded and modded one) at them and hoping they burst or turning around and running like all hell. That and there's a few spots in the quarantine area where it seems that the infected simply do NOT stop spawning. I'm not saying that you kill them, go off, come back, and suddenly there's more. Thats whats supposed to happen. I mean that I wind up killing a neverending stream of enemies that pour out of the busted window of an apartment or out of an alleyway until I either run out of weapons or find a ladder I can climb or a door I can close. It can get rather frustrating when I die for the fifteen time because I suddenly got mobbed to death by a bunch of berserk humans with the zombie virus eating their brains.
So far I've still only gotten to act 2, though I started over on Sam B (I was doing Purna but I want to try someone who can take a few hits). My likes and dislikes are summarized below.
Pros:
- I rather like the story. I like how the heroes all have a reason that they're capable fighters (Sam B grew up poor and had to learn how to fight to survive, Purna was a policewoman and has had combat training, Xian Mei is a member of the chinese police and has been trained in martial arts and swordfighting, Logan played pro football), I like how there's a reason they're all in Banoi in the first place (Sam B was performing as a rapper, Xian Mei worked at the hotel as a spy for China, Purna was a bodyguard for another guest, Logan was promoting a blood drive for some charity event), and I like how they're varied enough that it's interesting to play through on different characters.
- The setting is gorgeous in the first act. I know Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation complained that the setting for the second act was too much like all the other FPS games out there but, well, I don't play most FPS so I guess that one doesn't bother me too much. Personally, I do like how it seems both familiar (the second act reminds me a bit of some of the more crowded areas in Covington, near where I live in the real world) and alien (the foreign setting, the occasional bloody handprint or half eaten corpse).
- The weapon modification is still a favorite of mine. They added a bunch of different weapons that you can find, from makeshift things like broom handles and boat oars to machetes and sledgehammers, and then added a bunch of ways to mod them. Some are fairly simple (just pound a bunch of nails into a baseball bat and give the infected a nice case of tetanus to go along with their zombification) to some really creative ideas (duct tape a battery to a machete and wire the ends to the metal to electrify the blade). A few are a bit implausible, like the ripper mod which lets you attach a spinning sawblade to the end of blunt weapons (I could see it breaking off rather easily in the real world), but then I think plausability went out the window about the same time people rose from the dead and started eating each other.
- The voice acting is actually rather well done in this one. Though maybe its just because I have a thing for British accents. Still, Sam B and Xian Mei sound like how you'd expect people with their backgrounds to sound rather than walking stereotypes like blacks and asians wind up being portrayed as so often in popular media.
- Vehicles. This is definitely my favorite part of the game. If you find a truck that doesn't have any obvious damage feel free to hotwire it and powerslide some zombies into a fine gooey paste on your tires. Its very satisfying in a visceral way to just plow right through a crowd and smash them into a wall or a fence or just over your head. I also like how the truck does actually take damage when you hit stuff. The windshield will shatter and your driver will punch the glass out so they can see, the engine will begin to emit smoke, its not much but its a nice touch. Its also a good way to deal with certain extra annoying enemies (see below) as the thugs may be able to send you flying, but they're no tanks and one good slam from the front end of a truck will do some severe damage.
The Cons:
- Some of the zombies are downright unfair if you don't come prepared. The Thugs can knock half your life off (and your ass about twenty feet) with a single blow, yet most of your weapons will probably be melee when you first encounter them. Its easier once you get instructions to make molotovs and deo-bombs and can use those to set them on fire, but until then I had to just be satisfied that they can't walk above a slow shambling pace and that I could just tap shift and sprint right past them. I have found that I can just wait until a split second after they swing their arms, or until they're roaring, then jump in and whack them a few times before they can react... but it only works if its one on one. If there's walkers, infected, or anything else nearby I have to run away and try to lure their buddies off them so I can sort them out before dealing with the big boy... and thats assuming I don't wind up getting the attention of any others in the process. The suiciders however are a royal pain. They're at least noticeable (they cackle insanely when you draw near, though I think I heard one of them try to say 'help me' which did give me a bit of a chill) but if you try to take them down at melee range they will blow your ass up. Literally. Its an instant-kill for anything nearby, friend or foe.
- Repairing your weapons is a pain. Yes it makes the game more real if you have to maintain your weapons, but with hordes of zombies coming that means repairs are either frequent or you're supper. That and repairs, even when done at a workbench you just happened to stumble across in an abandoned building, cost money. Why? What the hell are you spending it on, and who are you paying? Do you just rub it on the weapon and it magically becomes whole again by the will of Franklin, Grant, and Jefferson? If you think about it this can really shatter the feel of the game... but then again, see the note about plausability going out the window when the dead started chomping on their loved ones.
- Its very easy to get overwhelmed in single player. Yes I know Dead Island was intended for multiple players, but with most RPGs (MMOs being the exception), I prefer something that I can enjoy by myself. As I mentioned above a few places in the second act are really downright nasty with enemy spawns. You'll get overwhelmed fast not because you're not killing them fast enough, but because they simply don't. Stop. Coming! I know it's a zombie game and they're not supposed to, but this goes beyond keeping with the theme here. I had to either activate my fury mode and try to punch my way out of a mob before they could take my down by sheer numbers or resign myself to having to restart from the last checkpoint... again.
- While the voices are good, the NPC models often aren't. Many have some odd shiny-looking skin tone and a herky-jerky motion to their animation that makes them come off as looking less human than the zombies, almost like some kind of a wooden puppet on strings. Though the skin thing could just be my computer, the animation is still off. That and many NPCs will repeat their little dialogue snippets several times within the same thirty seconds which can get really repetitive in certain scenarios, speaking of which...
- Escort quests. Ye gods escort quests. This is one that Deep Silver never got around to fixing. The escort quests are very numerous, very difficult, and hands down the worst part of the game. Thankfully most of them are avoidable sidequests, but should you decide to bite the bullet and do one these guys are downright suicidal. They'll sneak along next to you all careful like until anything slightly undead-looking comes into view in which case they'll bellow a war-cry and charge in, weapon flailing... which is really frustrating when you're trying to escort some guy's wimpy brother back to him and he's trying to beat a thug senseless with a bit of wood. The worst bit is that if I die I just wind up a few feet back and a bit lighter in the wallet as a penalty, but if they die then Game Over, reload save?
Still, despite all the negatives I think I will keep going with this one. I'm curious to see how the story plays out beyond act 2 and I want to find out if they ever reveal exactly what the hell is turning everyone into zombies. Biological weapon gone wrong? Random act of god? Prelude to an alien invasion? Da voodoo? This is what bugged me about Left 4 Dead, they never explain what caused the infection other than just 'the green flu'. What exactly is it and what caused it in the first place?
But then I'm a total geek for this sort of stuff, so yeah.
Dead Winter: http://deadwinter.cc/
The Zombie Hunters: http://www.thezombiehunters.com/index.php
Good stuff, but yeah, lately I've been in a zombie mood and Left 4 Dead isn't any fun unless the rest of my pack is around to play it with me, so I decided to return to the lush, tropical, zombie-infested island of Banoi.
They have made a few changes to the game that I've noticed. For one, it seems to be a lot less stingy with healing items than before. Also there are more checkpoints (or at least it seems that way) and overall it's a lot less frustrating to get around than it was last time.
Mind you, I do still have some gripes. In Act 2 you're still more or less screwed if you come up against a suicider (-exactly- what it sounds like) and don't have a bomb or gun handy then you're stuck either throwing one of your melee weapons (by this point almost certainly a valuable upgraded and modded one) at them and hoping they burst or turning around and running like all hell. That and there's a few spots in the quarantine area where it seems that the infected simply do NOT stop spawning. I'm not saying that you kill them, go off, come back, and suddenly there's more. Thats whats supposed to happen. I mean that I wind up killing a neverending stream of enemies that pour out of the busted window of an apartment or out of an alleyway until I either run out of weapons or find a ladder I can climb or a door I can close. It can get rather frustrating when I die for the fifteen time because I suddenly got mobbed to death by a bunch of berserk humans with the zombie virus eating their brains.
So far I've still only gotten to act 2, though I started over on Sam B (I was doing Purna but I want to try someone who can take a few hits). My likes and dislikes are summarized below.
Pros:
- I rather like the story. I like how the heroes all have a reason that they're capable fighters (Sam B grew up poor and had to learn how to fight to survive, Purna was a policewoman and has had combat training, Xian Mei is a member of the chinese police and has been trained in martial arts and swordfighting, Logan played pro football), I like how there's a reason they're all in Banoi in the first place (Sam B was performing as a rapper, Xian Mei worked at the hotel as a spy for China, Purna was a bodyguard for another guest, Logan was promoting a blood drive for some charity event), and I like how they're varied enough that it's interesting to play through on different characters.
- The setting is gorgeous in the first act. I know Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation complained that the setting for the second act was too much like all the other FPS games out there but, well, I don't play most FPS so I guess that one doesn't bother me too much. Personally, I do like how it seems both familiar (the second act reminds me a bit of some of the more crowded areas in Covington, near where I live in the real world) and alien (the foreign setting, the occasional bloody handprint or half eaten corpse).
- The weapon modification is still a favorite of mine. They added a bunch of different weapons that you can find, from makeshift things like broom handles and boat oars to machetes and sledgehammers, and then added a bunch of ways to mod them. Some are fairly simple (just pound a bunch of nails into a baseball bat and give the infected a nice case of tetanus to go along with their zombification) to some really creative ideas (duct tape a battery to a machete and wire the ends to the metal to electrify the blade). A few are a bit implausible, like the ripper mod which lets you attach a spinning sawblade to the end of blunt weapons (I could see it breaking off rather easily in the real world), but then I think plausability went out the window about the same time people rose from the dead and started eating each other.
- The voice acting is actually rather well done in this one. Though maybe its just because I have a thing for British accents. Still, Sam B and Xian Mei sound like how you'd expect people with their backgrounds to sound rather than walking stereotypes like blacks and asians wind up being portrayed as so often in popular media.
- Vehicles. This is definitely my favorite part of the game. If you find a truck that doesn't have any obvious damage feel free to hotwire it and powerslide some zombies into a fine gooey paste on your tires. Its very satisfying in a visceral way to just plow right through a crowd and smash them into a wall or a fence or just over your head. I also like how the truck does actually take damage when you hit stuff. The windshield will shatter and your driver will punch the glass out so they can see, the engine will begin to emit smoke, its not much but its a nice touch. Its also a good way to deal with certain extra annoying enemies (see below) as the thugs may be able to send you flying, but they're no tanks and one good slam from the front end of a truck will do some severe damage.
The Cons:
- Some of the zombies are downright unfair if you don't come prepared. The Thugs can knock half your life off (and your ass about twenty feet) with a single blow, yet most of your weapons will probably be melee when you first encounter them. Its easier once you get instructions to make molotovs and deo-bombs and can use those to set them on fire, but until then I had to just be satisfied that they can't walk above a slow shambling pace and that I could just tap shift and sprint right past them. I have found that I can just wait until a split second after they swing their arms, or until they're roaring, then jump in and whack them a few times before they can react... but it only works if its one on one. If there's walkers, infected, or anything else nearby I have to run away and try to lure their buddies off them so I can sort them out before dealing with the big boy... and thats assuming I don't wind up getting the attention of any others in the process. The suiciders however are a royal pain. They're at least noticeable (they cackle insanely when you draw near, though I think I heard one of them try to say 'help me' which did give me a bit of a chill) but if you try to take them down at melee range they will blow your ass up. Literally. Its an instant-kill for anything nearby, friend or foe.
- Repairing your weapons is a pain. Yes it makes the game more real if you have to maintain your weapons, but with hordes of zombies coming that means repairs are either frequent or you're supper. That and repairs, even when done at a workbench you just happened to stumble across in an abandoned building, cost money. Why? What the hell are you spending it on, and who are you paying? Do you just rub it on the weapon and it magically becomes whole again by the will of Franklin, Grant, and Jefferson? If you think about it this can really shatter the feel of the game... but then again, see the note about plausability going out the window when the dead started chomping on their loved ones.
- Its very easy to get overwhelmed in single player. Yes I know Dead Island was intended for multiple players, but with most RPGs (MMOs being the exception), I prefer something that I can enjoy by myself. As I mentioned above a few places in the second act are really downright nasty with enemy spawns. You'll get overwhelmed fast not because you're not killing them fast enough, but because they simply don't. Stop. Coming! I know it's a zombie game and they're not supposed to, but this goes beyond keeping with the theme here. I had to either activate my fury mode and try to punch my way out of a mob before they could take my down by sheer numbers or resign myself to having to restart from the last checkpoint... again.
- While the voices are good, the NPC models often aren't. Many have some odd shiny-looking skin tone and a herky-jerky motion to their animation that makes them come off as looking less human than the zombies, almost like some kind of a wooden puppet on strings. Though the skin thing could just be my computer, the animation is still off. That and many NPCs will repeat their little dialogue snippets several times within the same thirty seconds which can get really repetitive in certain scenarios, speaking of which...
- Escort quests. Ye gods escort quests. This is one that Deep Silver never got around to fixing. The escort quests are very numerous, very difficult, and hands down the worst part of the game. Thankfully most of them are avoidable sidequests, but should you decide to bite the bullet and do one these guys are downright suicidal. They'll sneak along next to you all careful like until anything slightly undead-looking comes into view in which case they'll bellow a war-cry and charge in, weapon flailing... which is really frustrating when you're trying to escort some guy's wimpy brother back to him and he's trying to beat a thug senseless with a bit of wood. The worst bit is that if I die I just wind up a few feet back and a bit lighter in the wallet as a penalty, but if they die then Game Over, reload save?
Still, despite all the negatives I think I will keep going with this one. I'm curious to see how the story plays out beyond act 2 and I want to find out if they ever reveal exactly what the hell is turning everyone into zombies. Biological weapon gone wrong? Random act of god? Prelude to an alien invasion? Da voodoo? This is what bugged me about Left 4 Dead, they never explain what caused the infection other than just 'the green flu'. What exactly is it and what caused it in the first place?
But then I'm a total geek for this sort of stuff, so yeah.
