Dead Island: Slice and Dice in Paradise

The opening of Dead Island sees you lurching through throngs of blissed-out partygoers, pawing at them desperately and mumbling incoherently as neon lights blur and swirl around the edges of your vision. But this isn't some unique narrative twist in which you begin the game from the perspective of an infected zombie. The explanation is far less sinister: you're drunk.

Eventually you make your way back to your room at the Royal Palms Resort and pass out, sleeping through until the next morning. You lay down in paradise, and wake up in hell. You emerge from your room to find only silence in the hallway, and luggage carts abandoned and overturned. The door of the neighboring room is wide open, its resident face down in the middle of the room with a steak knife wedged between her shoulder blades. Guess she should have tipped the room service guy.

Shocked, you stumble into the elevator thinking that this is the worst hangover you've experienced since The Hangover Part II, when the elevator cables give way and carriage starts plummeting down the shaft. As each floor hurtles past you're offered brief flashes of horror glimpsed through the open doors, of partygoers you remember from the night before feasting on corpses and staring back at you with blackened, unnatural eyes.

Then the elevator hits bottom, and the screen goes black.

... And then this happens.

It's from here that the Dead Island begins in earnest. After being rescued by a group of survivors, you must then commence a series of non-linear quests that have you battling your way through zombie hordes in order to perform tasks such as the retrieval of insulin for a sickly diabetic, or the engine parts for a mechanic desperate to get his car started in order to high tail it to the other side of the island. Aside from helping your fellow survivors, you're also propelled through the game by your efforts to find out exactly who or what is behind the zombie outbreak, and to get the hell out of there lest one of the undead hotel guests sunning themselves beside the pool jams a curly straw in your jugular and sips on you like you're a man-sized Bloody Mary.

The most immediately striking thing about Dead Island is its tropical setting. Developer Techland may have recently shot itself in the foot by taking its established wild western Call of Juarez series and setting it in a present day urban backdrop with The Cartel, but its decision to set a zombie game on a beautiful resort island in the Pacific Ocean was undeniably a smart one. Survival horror typically relies on shadowy corridors to ramp up feelings of dread and claustrophobia, but Dead Island sets the action in lush, open, sun-kissed vistas – palette-swapping sparkling blues and greens in place of dull blacks and greys. The idyllic beauty that surrounds you serves to make the violent encounters with each bloody-minded zombie all the more jarring and unsettling.

But hey - you're at a five-star resort on a Pacific island, you need to enjoy yourself, right? Fancy a leisurely paddle from one end of the beach to the other? Know that it involves picking up an oar and using it to cave in the skulls of the boardshort-wearing ghouls that stagger around the shoreline. Or why not just lay by one of the many resort pools? And by that of course we mean lay waste to the numerous infected swimmers who are less interested in improving their backstroke and more keen on removing your backbone.

There's certainly a focus on up close and personal melee attacks in the game, at least early on – over the course of the game's first hour we certainly didn't find any firearms, instead we relied on broomsticks instead of boomsticks to beat down the evil dead. Elsewhere there were wrenches, pipes and knives, all of which can be either wielded or thrown – it's particularly satisfying to fling a kitchen cleaver, blade over handle into a zombie's throat and see its tip split through the flesh out the back of its neck. Indeed it seems that a lot of development work has gone into the deformation and dismemberment of the zombie character models in the game – heads pop like grapes, arms are removed like chicken wings, and one particularly forceful blow we delivered with a wrench sent a zombie twisting around through the air while its legs stayed planted on the ground – separated from its body.

Objects you find can be combined at workbenches to create more powerful weaponry, but this isn't Dead Rising and you won't be strapping chainsaws to an umbrella to create a twirling device of zombie death. Instead the modifications are far more realistic and practical, such as hammering a nine inch nail through a bat in order to make each swing more lethal.

You can also upgrade your character as you earn experience points throughout the game. At the start you choose one of four characters representing a different character class - one a specialist with blunt melee attacks, one adept with firearms, and so on - and you upgrade them accordingly via a surprisingly deep skill tree. Certainly with the extensive character upgrade system, combined with the open-world quests and the non-stop looting of corpses and cabinets, Dead Island feels as though it has more in common with Fallout 3 than it does with Left 4 Dead.

It definitely seems like a huge game world - the timed nature of our hands-on meant that we didn't get to stray too far from the beach we began on, but just staring out across the water we could see sprawling masses of land framing a large inlet that were just begging to be explored.

Check Out Dead Island in Action

The only major criticism that we can level at the game based off our one-hour hands-on is that the voice acting is straight up awful. Given that the island in question – the fictitious 'Banoi' – is supposedly situated off the coast of Papua New Guinea, the bulk of the survivors in the game appear to be holiday-goers from the neighboring countries of Australia and New Zealand. Yet their jumbled dialects make them sound like Polish people impersonating a South African mimicking Paul Hogan from his 'shrimp on the barbie' tourism commercials from the eighties. It's possible the audio was still placeholder in this early build of the game, but with only a month to go until the game's release it's most likely that these voices will stay, and the clumsiness of the acting really lessens the impact of any drama the game is trying to create.

Otherwise we remain optimistic that Dead Island's mix of melee combat and RPG-style questing will be a satisfying one – it's set to be a sunny retreat to a beautiful resort, where 'retreat' means evading the murderous hordes, and 'resort' refers to the desperate measures you'll take in order to survive.