Dead Island, dead disappointing

I recently rented Dead Island through LoveFilm and was very much looking forward to it. From looking at previews of the game last year my impression had been that it was an open world zombie survival game where the goal was to find one of a multitude of ways off the island.

When I started playing I was very impressed with the melee system, the graphics were excellent and every venture out into onto the island was nerve racking and felt like a huge risk. After several hours of play, once the novelty wore off, I did get a bit bored of it but as the story developed and I moved around and acquired new items I found myself gripped enough to keep going.

Now, I should point out that one thing I hated from the start, and which I knew about before playing, was the fact it is a "level based" game. My that I mean your character gains levels as he/she gains experience. I HATE level based character development - it's crude and old fashioned and unimaginative. What makes this worse, as seen in Dead Island, is that you can't use certain items until you reach a certain level. This is a terrible system! For example, my character was using a crowbar for quite a while, which I enjoyed using as it was very effective, when I then found another, better crowbar I found I couldn't use it because I wasn't a high enough level?! How ridiculous is that?

Another ridiculous aspect to levelling up is that all the monsters levelled up too, so at the beginning of the game you can kill a zombie with a normal, salvaged iron pipe, but once you level up a few times that same iron pipe is utterly useless!

I played through about two thirds of the story before I finally told myself that this really isn't gripping anymore, I'm just playing because I want to find a quick way off the island. So I stopped and looked on the interweb for a walk through and discovered to my dismay that there was only one way off the island and all the other potential routes all funnel into one conclusion! Once I read that I packed the game up and posted it back to LoveFilm, giving it a 2 star rating (out of 5).

What I enjoyed about the game was the environment, the exploration (although there is a negative here too), the intense fights for survival and limited resources.

What I didn't like was the level-based nature of character development, the exploration - the fact that the exact same items would respawn in the exact same position 15 minutes later - and the single track story.

In conclusion I feel they missed the point of a zombie survival, open world game. I liked developing skills on my character as I progressed, but you can do this far more elegantly than by using a levelling up system. Also, instead of the story funnelling into one final conclusion I would have liked to see several potential paths off the island, as I'm sure was originally promised.

I think what enticed them into designing the game this way was the modern gamer. Most big grossing games have cinematic cut scenes, levelling systems and silly names for even basic weapons and stories revolving around "interesting" character relationships. All of which they have tried to do.

I would have liked to have seen them cut out most of the cutscenes, sacrifice the top shelf graphics and see them build an entirely free roam island, with several outposts of survivors, hard to reach areas where precious resources can be gathered and multiple story lines, which lead off into different endings.