Dead Island, the first - person zombie game. It is published by Deep Silver on the 9th of September 2011. When they published the trailer I fell in love with the idea. The trailer was absolutely brilliant and it did receive the deserved awards for that. But is the gameplay just as good?

**Story**

It is set on a tropical island, it used to be a paradise till the chaos starts. Zombies start to break out and only few people seem to be immune to the infection. In the beginning cinematic you clearly see how chaos suddenly breaks out, you see the cinematic through the eyes of a drunk guy. While you are in one of the clubs the zombies start to appear and the game starts. You start with playing the prologue which you have to do on your own. I love the atmosphere of the game since the first minutes I was playing. It has this scary and lonely effect. You are in a hotel which is completely abandoned, at least that is what you think. Soon you will find yourself running away from zombies and so you get rescued by other survivors. The game now really begins.

**Gameplay**

To talk more in detail about the controls and gameplay, you move your character with the basic WASD movement controls and using weapons is by clicking the left mouse button. At the early stages of the game there were some annoying bugs with movement. There were some serious issues at the release of the game, but in my opinion, they fixed it good enough with some patches. The combat is somehow fun and it feels alright. You can hit the zombies on different body parts which results in de-heading a zombie or to cut of their arms. You do more damage on for example the head. While you are doing missions and quests you will find some other survivors which could lead to a couple of side quests. The whole island is basically filled with zombies, weapons, money and items. You can use those items and the money for upgrading or repairing your weapons. There are also different zombies, some stronger than others, which makes it more difficult in some situations.

The atmosphere there was in the beginning stays during the whole game. Although you are chased by zombies every now and then, you are still on the beautiful tropical island. The game can be scary sometimes, especially when you have to enter different rooms which are locked. You have to break your way through by moving the mouse forward at a given moment. You will sometimes be shocked when a zombie is waiting around the corner, and these moments were brilliant. The characters in the game are not outstanding or at least not remarkable, but they are alright.

**Multiplayer**

The Multiplayer/Co-op mode is one of the best features of this game and they did a good job with it. You just open your save game and you start where you ended the last time you played. Then every time you are in a place where another player is currently too, then you can join each other. Of course you can make use of the lobby where you can join people yourself, but the other option is so great because those people are just as far with the game as you. Also when you do choose to join people by searching the list of people and they are further than you, you can join them, but it will not save it on your game file.

**Graphics**

The graphics are beautiful, the way the zombies are modelled is absolutely stunning and it makes them really scary. The island is perfectly made, the graphics have wonderful textures and they tried and, in my opinion, succeeded with optimizing the detail as much as they could. Even when you watch from a far distance the landscapes and the buildings are in great detail. The blood effects and cut-off body parts flying around are fascinating, this adds so much to these kind of games. All by all beautiful graphics for the time it was released and they are still great.

To conclude, Dead Island is for the features and gameplay it gives you a great choice. Even though you don't like those kind of games, I would recommend to at least give this game a try. But for the zombie-fans this will be one of the best experiences you will ever have when it is about this genre.

Minimum required specifications :

OS: Windows XP
RAM: 1 GB RAM
Processor: Core2Duo 2.66 GHz
Graphics: ATI 2600XT 512MB VRAM (GeForce 8600GT)
HDD: 7 GB available hard drive space