I was lucky enough to receive a gift copy of Dead Island from my cousin, because she knows how much I like zombie games (if only because I see the potential behind each one of them).
Dead Island is pretty fun. I will try to do some reviewish talking here.
Graphics/Sound - Nothing too noticeable, really. Everyone has an Australian accent, but maybe that's part of the fluff behind the game. Not a lot of time is spent on backstory (none, in fact); you just get tossed into the game. There's some kind of cinematic before you get to the menu screen, but that's why you have an escape key. The graphics in-game are about the same as the graphics in the announcement trailer (the one where they tossed a little girl out of a window and then played it in reverse). If you play games in a different language, you'll get English audio but the other language's subtitles.
Controls - At first, the game feels clunky. If you're used to games where movement might as well be on skates or a hoverboard, this will throw you off a bit. But it's actually supposed to be like that. When you walk, you lean left and right a little with each step, just like you normally would. They did a good job of making your character a human being instead of a cyborg sent from the heavens to kick zombie ass. Combat is fun and effective, but it emphasizes how human you really are. You can't go around punching things all day because you'll get tired, and when a zombie latches on to you it takes some combo button pressing to get him off. There's a huge emphasis on immersion, which is great! I actually feel like I am the character. It helps that the guy I picked (there are 4 characters - I think 2 guys and 2 girls? each one has a specialty. I picked the rapper who specializes in heavy melee weapons) talks like I would (when coming across a grisly scene, he'll say things like "what the fuck..." in exactly the tone of voice I would use).
Weapons - Mostly melee. So far I've found night sticks, lead pipes, oars, and knives. There are crafting tables where you can build exploding knives and electrified swords and various other ridiculous things, but I'm not that far in the game yet.
Zombies - There are both slow and fast zombies. I see slow ones more often. I'm pretty sure they spawn randomly, but with a few scripted events (there's a boss fight early on that is begun with a cinematic, so I have to assume it was planned that way). You'll often find 3 or 4 them gathering around a corpse, eating it. There is a lot of blood and gore compared to the other zombie games I've played. I have yet to feel overwhelmed by the amount of zombies coming at me, but at the same time being attacked is no joke. They deal a lot of damage and will come at you from different angles so that you can't hit them all at once. The field of view seems pretty small compared to other shooters, but there might be a way to fix that if it's something that bothers you.
The game does suffer from a bit of consolitis. There is an autoaim feature that is defaulted to on (I haven't poked around for a way to turn it off yet), and will move the crosshair to objects near the middle of the screen. Since combat is melee-oriented, this isn't much of a problem. It can be somewhat annoying though to see your crosshair jump around a bit. A few players say they've seen things that would only make sense to put in an xbox or ps3 version of the game, which brings us to the game's flaws.
Put simply, it's buggy. There's a
day 1 patch that fixes 37 obvious issues, and I've heard that the developers have said there will be another one coming. Also, somehow Steam customers got a developer's version of the game, so if I press the "Y" key I get noclip. For me, this wouldn't really be a problem. I can stop myself from pressing the button and don't care how easy it is to cheat in a video game. Unfortunately, someone else decided to join my game (games are public by default) and fly a truck around the island, which eventually froze the game for me and I had to task manager it away.
Besides the incident with the flying truck, I haven't really played co-op. Far as I can tell I'm the only one in my group of gamers that has it, and I don't play public games. I'll let you guys know if I can convince someone I know to buy it and play it with me.
This is a fun game. It is immersive and thrilling, even with all its technical faults. I guess I'd give it about a 7/10, or maybe a 75/100. The only real problem, again, is that it's so damn buggy. So you might want to wait a couple of weeks for a second patch. If you liked Dead Rising except for the controls, then give this game a shot.