Hit and miss melee system
The pleasantly destructive lightning, fire, acid, explosive (and several dozen other) mods – or even just the addition of a few nails to your trusty stick, helps to keep the action fresh and entertaining. Upgrade benches will allow you to repair and further customise those weapons – provided you have the right modification plans and the pre-requisite amounts of duct tape, wires, and other scavengeable items. Even the guns have their own tiers of upgrades and ammunition and disposable explosives, despite being relatively hard to find out in the poolside bars and shanty towns of Banoi; can be easily created by the player at a bench for relatively no cost – once they find the right plans, of course.Weapon variety aside, it’s immediately clear that the true focus of Dead Island’s combat leans towards the melee end of the scale. It’s here that some of the merit of the game becomes visible, too. The close-quarters action is gory, visceral and ultimately satisfying. Bladed weapons neatly lop off limbs, while the blunter hammers and the occasional frying pan will allow you to immobilise the hordes by crushing parts of their bodies, meaning there’s some incentive to think methodically about how you can use your limited stamina to take out a group of infected. Another important factor is the kick move, which allows you to push back the nearest undead and gain valuable space to swing your weapon. It can even knock enemies off of their feet, allowing you to deliver critical attacks while they’re down, or even a head stomping finishing move.
However, this is on the presumption that your attacks connect at all. A significant percentage of the time, melee swings will mysteriously miss a target almost on top of you and knock over or disembowel the one behind them. Guns are even worse, with almost entirely arbitrary gunfight areas existing, where the player(s) is matched up again a group of looters armed to the teeth and inconsistent auto-aim and the lack of any kind of cover mechanic means that you’re more than likely to die a few times before you get the hang of things.
On the topic of dying, the penalty for death is fairly light in Dead Island. You respawn a random distance away from where you died (or so it seems, as appearing back in the middle of the horde that killed you is just as common as in the middle of a river 200ft away), with a sizable chunk of cash lost. This does however begin to mount up, and a few deaths in a sticky situation later game will prevent the player from keeping their weapons in top condition – potentially a dangerous cycle. With the lenient penalty however comes other, more worrying issues.
When you die, the game will remember the health and status of the enemies you were fighting, for the most part. However, in some sequences, most notable the jungle escort missions later in the game, the enemies are pre-scripted to ambush at certain points, meaning that all the ammunition, molotovs and even the rage you used to almost defeat a wave before dying will be lost – making the next attempt even harder.