PAX Prime ’11: Crack Some Undead Skulls On Dead Island

Dead Island got everyone’s attention a few months ago with its first trailer — an intensely cinematic, jaw-dropping teaser — but many are wondering whether the actual game can live up to such an ambitious video.

I spent a few minutes with a demo of  Dead Island  on the PAX show floor, and came away optimistic for the final game’s release.

When the demo begins, you’re barely conscious in a room with maybe seven or eight other people, and they’re deciding whether or not you’re infected — and by extension, whether or not to kill you. Someone yells at you, demanding you nod your head if you’re alive. You can make your character struggle to do so by wiggling the controller’s right stick. Once you’re back up and among the living, you can walk around and talk to the other people in the room, all of whom seem to be fairly shaken-up by whatever’s going on outside. A loud banging can be heard outside the door to the room.

Eventually, you find someone saying that they need to go help another survivor, who is outside fighting off the undead, and who apparently is the one who saved your life. Naturally, the next thing to do is to try and go outside, because it’s a videogame and you so crazy. The man guarding the door refuses to let you go without a weapon, but there’s an oar nearby so that’s not a problem for long.

Pushing the door open, you rush outside and are immediately attacked. You get up in time to smash your assailant’s head in, and start taking out more undead. You need to be careful here, as you have a stamina meter which depletes with each swing of your weapon. This introduces a bit of strategy, and does well to prevent you from feeling like a superhuman zombie hunter. It makes you feel more like an average joe caught in a catastrophic situation. The man you’re trying to rescue is fighting off a small group, which you help him dispatch before heading back into the starting room with the survivors. The other survivors mention something about you being immune, and you can start taking missions from them. The mission interface is pretty clever, with your character pulling up a sheet of paper with the details written down.

The audio direction in Dead Island is fantastic — I seriously got chills more than once. From the pounding on the door while talking to survivors in the room, to the sound of the undead surrounding me while outside, the audio was incredibly immersive and in my opinion completely made the demo.

I didn’t play further into the demo, but was pretty impressed with the presentation of the game up to this point. A large part of the demo was not player-controlled, but the parts that were felt pretty solid. I can’t overstate how satisfying I thought the audio was, so I’d definitely recommend playing with a nice surround sound setup or a good pair of headphones, when the demo and eventually full game are released.

I’ll need to play a bit more before plunking down sixty bucks for a pre-order, but at this point Dead Island is definitely on my radar.