Multiplayer

Dead Island offers everything availible to the single player expirience in a four player co-op environment as well. The game is essentially designed to be played at any moment with one to four players with the game adjusting difficulty and loot generation on the fly. Before strating a new game you can choose to set your game type to Cooperative instead of Single Player opening up options as to how many slots you want open to the public or only to friends as well as visibilty and voice chat decisions to make. Once the options are selected start the game and play. Only your friends and people you choose to invite can join the game in private slots while anyone far enough along in the game can fill the public slots.

At any point in time you can also pull up a menu while you are playing that will find public games that are currently active with open slots and are the best fit for where you are in the story. It is only a single click from there to jump right in sharing the joy of zombie carnage with others.

If that wasn’t enough, if you are playing in a cooperative game and you come within the vicinity of a place on the map where one of these best maches is you can simply initiate joining the game by pressing “J”. After a short load time you will be back in game playing with your new co-op partner.

The ease of joining and dropping out makes co-op play a breeze. The zombies, themselves, are leveled to each player personally meaning the challenege for all players will be the same even when a level 20 character joins a game even to help a level 1 and loot is handled simlarly. Better rewards are given, however, the more players are in a specific game instance to go along with the increased difficulty in foes and everything you do in a co-op game will save to your single player advancement.