Gameplay
Dead Island has an Elder Scrolls feel to it from the very beginning with its emphasis on melee combat and a vast open world to explore and loot until nothing is left but the game plays on this survival aspect very well. Your inventory is limited and yet with each swing of a weapon or each shot fired your durability and ammo decays. This forces you to scavenge in order to defend yourself or run back to the nearest safe haven to repair, upgrade and heal up. The map and quest log do a good job of keeping everything arranged and organized keeping confusion to a minimum.
A stamina bar is also ever present and just about everything you do requires stamina from running to jumping to swinging your weapon and when you are hit without any stamina left you are knocked prone and helpless. This forces you to strategize how you will dispatch your foes whether then wading in and swinging wildly.
Through dispatching the undead and missions, most of which you have to explore to find, you gain experience points which enables your character to level up and gain skill points which they can put into three separate trees: Fury, Combat, and Survival. The all three trees are unique to each survivor and enhance their predetermined specialties in various ways while affording you several boosts that can help make your journey throughout the game just a little easier. These trees are in no way railroaded and allow you to purely customize your character to the way you want to play while forcing you to make choices since you will never have enough skill points for everything in every single tree. Beware though, as you level up so do all of the enemies.
The Fury tree enhances your individual character’s “fury mode,” a timed mode you can activate with the press of a button turning yourself into a killing machine capable of overcoming enemies and odds you normally may not be able to. You unlock this by spending a single point in the tree and enhance both its length and ability over time.
The Combat tree enhances just that, your character’s combat ability. From Logan’s throwing and Sam B’s large blunt weapons to Purna’s penchant for firearms and Xian’s knives, everything in this tree will help you be that much more deadly and may even change the way you play.
The Survival tree is not as potent as the other two but equally just as important. Containing boosts that allow you to simply survive easier throughout your journey you’ll always be giving consideration to this tree every time you level up.
Dead Island also sports a robust and deep crafting system for the various knives, guns, pipes and boat oars you’ll need to equip your character with throughout the game in order to wade through the legions of undead roaming Banoi. Of course the game is nice enough to supply you with decent killing utensils but at each haven you unlock in the world you can find a repair and upgrade table. Upgrading weapons costs a bit of money each time and increases their effectiveness and overall durability but on top of this you can apply modifications to further enhance them. Upon completion of story and side missions you will be awarded these blueprints and mods that require materials scavenged all throughout the island. All of this is done through a rather intuitive click and confirm menu leaving very little to question while maintaining levels of customization.
