HoC experiences Dead Island: four (and one half) days in

So I am going to start this off with the words Stormblade shared with me when he arrived at the house yesterday morning:

"Good, you're wearing pants."

Lucky for him he was late.

I find that most of the things I want to write about Dead Island are the little niggly things that I find wrong with it. Well the reason these things annoy me is because of how much they got right.

And in Dead Island, Techland got a lot right. They are Polish by the way. Techland that is, not the Zombies.

It is a stellar Zombie survival game with a huge world, tons of quests, tons of zombies and 4 player co-op. 4 player co-op which I still haven't tested yet as Coxxorz was too cheap to spend the $20 that he had just saved on express shipping. Some day his (and Graybush's apparently) game will come in.

One small peeve about multiplayer. I was playing my game and got up to leave for 2 minutes or so. When I came back I glanced at the pause screen before starting the game up and noticed that there was now 2 of 4 players in the game. Hey! I hadn't realized anyone else had bought the game yet, let's go see who it is. "WalktoMorder." Who is that? Well I didn't know either. Dead Island will apparently let just anyone into your game. I looked for a privacy setting and couldn't find it. I didn't see a request to join, he was just there and he wasn't someone from my friends list. I also couldn't find a list to boot him which will be annoying when Coxxorz starts stealing all my stuff. I had to disconnect myself. I found this odd.

I am enjoying this game and would recommend it to anyone who likes RPGs or Zombies. The closest game I can compare it to is Borderlands. While Borderlands was an Action game heavy with RPG aspects, Dead Island is an RPG heavy with Action aspects.

The biggest recommendation I can give the game at 15% in (main quest only, it doesn't count side quests and random exploring) is I want to keep playing it. I even get slightly peeved when others make me quit out to play Call of Duty Zombie Mode. Not too peeved because, hey, it's still Zombies, but peeved.

I get the impression that Techland was surprised by the reaction they received from the Dead Island Trailer and chose to give the game extra time and effort to get it up to a AAA title. I'm glad they did.

Did they get to an AAA title? Well no I don't think so – but they did get very close.

And I would rather support the under dog, original games than throw $60 at another year's worth of Call of Duty.

Yes, I know and you know that I will still be giving Call of Duty my $60 this year. What can I say? I'm weak. Sob!