Zadzooks: Dead Island review

Anyone tired of zombies yet? Raise your rotting-flesh-covered arm. I didn’t think so. Let me expose you to yet another undead maelstrom orchestrated in the spirit of Dead Rising, Left 4 Dead and a pinch of Borderlands thrown in for diabolical pleasure.

Dead Island (Deep Silver and Techland, reviewed for Xbox 360, rated M for Mature, $59.99) is a four-player, co-operative experience in which gamers hang out on a beautiful resort island of Banoi and spend their time helping vacationers, crafting weapons and painstakingly slaughtering infected humans.

The massive adventure requires a player select from one of four unlucky characters — a female resort employee with a martial arts background, a male rap star, an ex pro football player and a female body guard — each with their own fighting expertise and roam an open-ended world covered with death.

For first-person survival horror, the game thrives on survival but not as much on horror. Frankly, even the shock quotient of witnessing humans in various states of bloody decay wore off about an hour in the constant killing spree.

Now, I’ll give props to Techland. Exploring locations one might use like a wave machine to calm the soul (especially soothing is a cove rippling with wash from the ocean) are delightfully juxtaposed against zombies in my face, turning my Zen moment into a sweaty fight for my life.

Not only are these shrieking, groaning and screaming villains plentiful as the island’s palm trees but celebrate nearly every genre of the gruesome species ranging from lumbering (”Night of the Living Dead”) to slobbering aggressive (”28 Days Later,” “Zombieland”) to mutated (Resident Evil).

So how plentiful are our health challenged? After just five hours and having traveled 33 miles around the Island (walking, running and driving), I had already wrung up over 500 ghouls killed. Talk about a desensitizing exercise.

Besides putting flesh-eaters out of their misery, action revolves around collecting junk, completing missions (from finding gas to burn bodies to retrieving a piece of jewelry to collecting tissue samples for scientists) and propelling the thin story (zombieapocalypse courtesy of another infection).

What’s most frightening in Dead Island is the sheer number of weapons (that degrade with use) and junk littering the island ready to combine at any available workbench (don’t forget to find the blueprint) to deliver some nasty kills.

Baseball bat, baton, shovel, axe, machete, hammer, crowbar, brass knuckles, wrench, metal pipe, paddle, sledghammer, knives, Molotov cocktails, revolvers, shotgun and rifle, to name a few, looking for matches with duct tape, spikes, clamp, car parts, batteries, gas, glue, magnets, meat, soap, wire etc.

Let your imaginations run wild but get ready for fun with deodorant grenades, spiked lumber, a Ripper (buzzsaw and bat combo exclusive to the special edition of the game) and sticky bombs.

Players also earn experience points through good deeds and kills to enhance combat skills and survival traits through a branching upgrade system.

Of course, the level of gross-out splatter gore throughout will make a butcher wince and Dexter giggle as the player almost always needs to pummel a zombie until it just falls into bloody mess, with exposed innards, bones cracked and detached appendages and/or head, depending on his weapon.

Although the co-operative experience really sets the game apart, I do suggest finding sworn buddies of like experience levels to take part in the epic.

Often, I was pestered to team up with what sounded like a 10-year-old (where are this kid’s parents?) looking for a friend who kept following me around, slightly creepy.

I will offer that I did find a helpful Samurai sword-wielding Samaritan to team with for a while, and even let me take all of the loot. He was much more interested in putting the infected out of their misery.

The drama of the situation is not helped by never really dying in the game. The character collapses and respawns in seven seconds, only losing a bit of cash for his demise. The only drama is wondering where I will come back to life (a bit glitchy in my opinion).

At the end of the day, the game delivers gory, near non-stop action as promised but never scares up enough emotion or humanity to make me feel vested in its characters or story.

However, I do not think a mature gamer will find a better way to relive stress than with a visit to Dead Island. It’s a virtual vacation that brings the grisliest of virtual nightmares to life.