DEAD ISLAND DEFINITIVE EDITION review

Shorts? Check! Toothbrush? Check! AK47 with advanced scope and bayonet? Check! Yep, all ready for the holiday from hell…

Dead Island Definitive Edition is an update of both Dead Island and it’s expansion Dead Island: Riptide, with better graphics and tweaked gameplay for the latest generation of consoles. And mighty fine it looks too, with improved textures and detailing. A nice fresh coat of paint all round then, but how does it play?

An action RPG, Dead Island is played from the first person perspective, set on an island riddled with zombies. And there are thousands of them. Seriously, how many people died on this island – literally everywhere you go, no matter where you turn, you run into a member of the undead.

Anyhow, in a strange way, all these zombies are a good thing, as the more you kill, then more experienced you get, enabling you to upgrade your characters skillset and advance up the levels. You can also gain much needed experience by completing quests, which range in terms of difficulty from piece-of-pee up to complete-and-utter-nightmare.

As luck would have it, your character is immune to the zombie virus, so no matter how many time they bite or scratch you, you will never turn to the dark side. As you play the game you encounter other survivors, but unfortunately they don’t share your immunity, so it is down to you to do all the dirty work throughout the game.

Dead Island is good fun, and you can see the reasons they remastered it onto the latest consoles. Running around killing zombies never gets old, and even if you have played the original, you will probably still be interested in revisiting the island once again.

Slightly dated by today’s standards? Maybe, but for this price you really can’t go wrong. Just don’t forget the pack everything… those zombie bites can get everywhere.

Mark Pilkington