Review: Dead Island

Ghaaaaa… That was miserable. This is the first time in a while I have been so fucking over a video game before completing it… and yet oddly compelled to see it through to the finish. Even though it ended totally predictably and without any twists or new gameplay elements added past the very first couple missions. This game is just idiocy. It's mindlessly running from point A to point B gunning down every thing in your way, watching an absolutely atrocious cut-scene and the rinsing and repeating. Yet, for some reason this mindlessness is palpable to a certain degree. I found this game to be a nice accompaniment to watching tv and listening to podcasts, as it is so mindless and inconsequential that you really only need to uses about 10% of your brain power to make it through. And I seriously wonder how many people actually made it through this one. The presentation quality seems to take a pretty hard dip around the halfway point, and the mission structures become even more banal and annoying than they were before. You will run back and forth between the same locations hundreds of times looking for the next item or switch that will further the absolutely asinine plot. I don't want to give anything away… actually there is nothing to give away. I don't know what happened and could not care less. There's an island, zombie outbreak, you are immune, etc. It's the same tired Zombie conventions you've seen in every movie, game or whatever since the beginning of the zombie craze, a fixation that I am personally bored shitless of. Seriously, no more zombie games for a while guys.
Theres really not much more to say about this time waster of a game. I could pick it apart piece by piece but it would be needlessly dissecting a turd. It's pretty much all turd- all the way through. Certain questions continue to bother me though: why was the premier trailer for the game so damn good? It was emotional, terrifying and seemed to signal something that would take the genre in a new direction that was laced with heartbreaking ethos. Instead the actual cast of the game is a swath of gansta rap cliches- even going so far as to have an awful zombie-themed rap over the ending credits? Why did the cutscenes, which featured atrocious texture pop-in, expressionless faces, and seemingly nonexistent lip-syncing, look worse than pretty much anything I have seen on the precious generation of consoles?! Why does the game impose any real penalty for dying, meaning that you can just go in guns blazing, die on purpose, re-spawn and just do it again until all of the enemies are dead? It totally ruined any sense of fear or dread i might have had. Why did this game last for 25 hours, padded out with a hundred pointless busy-work missions? Why do they set up the ending for a sequel? God no!
    I realize that this game is intended to be played co-operatively. And for stretches of it, I did. It made it a bit more fun, but seemed to increase the occurrence of glitches, frame-rate issues, the game freezing outright, etc. Also, if you join someone else's game, you are simply gaining experience and not progressing your own plot. For someone like me, who was simply trying to power through this mess, that did not work. So, my only option was to just wait and see if people wanted to join in on my game, which only happened 4-5 times.
    Dead Island is a culmination of things that need to go away in the video game industry: mindless shooting, overuse of zombies as a plot device, pointless fetch quests, total lack of any meaningful story, cliche characters, length that seems wildly disproportional to the amount of time you would actually want to play it, a disregard for presentation that is honestly insulting to the completionist gamer,  extremely graphic violence with a lazy context… the list goes on. And yet, it still doesn't descend into the absolute pits of gaming hell. As hypocritical as it sounds, I guess I had a bit of fun. If this was a movie it would be Sci-Fi Channel Original.  4/10