You start off in prison for shooting your dead psychic brother and you’re about to get beaten by some nasty guards but you’re then rescued by your dead psychic brother who you’re in prison for killing who assumes the body of one of the guards and kills the guard through the face and you run away and there’s some soldiers in offices and some monsters too and stuff and the prison is going to explode and the prison explodes I don’t know why I think they do that when you’re not looking because that’s a prison thing and I don’t know I’ve never been in a prison so it might happen and you escape through the sewers but the sewers fill up with water from the exploding prison and your dead psychic brother rescues you from there too and you end up in a village which looks a bit middle eastern and I don’t think your dead psychic brother is there but someone is speaking to me and I think it must be him unless there’s other dead psychic people talking to me and I keep absorbing corpses that glow too because points make prizes and there’s lots of army people who know you’ve escaped from the prison that exploded after your dead psychic brother rescued you and they’ve got giant mechs with machine guns that shoot you in the face and there’s a helicopter which drops teleporting people and one of them is all big and blue and fire lasers at you and everyone keeps shouting all the time non stop always shouting they keep shouting make them stop shouting and and and

…I need a lie down. I’m only an hour in and I feel like my brain has eaten all the smarties.

I’m bored of swearing in games because it’s boring swearing. “Find the bastard” as ambient dialogue repeated ad infinitum is boring. “She’s a bitch” “He’s a bastard”, well, you’re a tedious wronghead so shut up.

Most in game swears are boring. The moment early on LA Noire decided it was Full Metal Jacket was boring. The bit in that game with the thingy and the bloke that swore, that was boring too. Shit, fuck and bastard and the uses thereof in most videogame scripts are boring. They’re just there because no-one has anything creative to say. They’re just there because hey, we’re grown ups and we swear. We’re videogames, hear us roar swear.

Only Bulletstorm in recent times has come out of the swear test well, probably helped by the Cyril Sneer meets Gunnery Sergeant Hartman of the General. That’s funny enough all by itself. The fun with dicks is just the icing on the cake. The rest? Fucking boring.

Hey, videogame script writer – you are not John Cooper Clarke:

You are not Malcolm Tucker:

You’re not Bill Hicks:

You don’t have that class. You’re more like a 7 year old who’s just discovered a rude word and is going to use it anyway just for effect only using “poo” would have been far funnier and far more hard hitting than mindlessly blurting out “bastard” every 5 seconds.

The difference is, you’re old enough to know the difference.

So either learn to swear properly or fuck off. Thanks.

I didn’t have much in the way of hopes for Dead Island. Its drunk driving advert now game trailer with sad piano music was nothing but a little bit seat squirmingly embarrassing and well, tatty.

I realise it’s a little defeating the point to say “play it with the scenes in the right order, the theme from Hawaii-Five-O and at the right speed and then we’ll talk” but yeah, play it with the scenes in the right order, the theme from Hawaii-Five-O and at the right speed and then we’ll talk. Until then, I’ll just treat it as the full marketing that it is and spit on it from a distance.

Still, clearly it worked. Enthusiasm for the how-the-fuck-many-years in development Dead Island went from roughly none whatsoever to it somehow being heralded as the saviour of all things zombie game and the best thing since the last best thing (our survey says that this is probably X-Com because nothing was made that was any good since according to internet sources yesterday) all in the space of an afternoon. I still believe this probably says more about some sort of desire for games to be serious and taken seriously* that gets misplaced than just manipulative marketing (there has to be a desire for the marketing to feed on, after all) but for some reason, I never became convinced Dead Island would be the one.

Maybe it was the fact that aside from the trailer there were absolutely no signs whatsoever that Dead Island would be that game and had, repeatedly, just been pitched as a thing where you hit zombies with other things and they go crack. The earliest shots showed a fair bit of promise by looking like a low rent game version of a Fulci film. Yes, more low rent than Fulci. Perfect.

That’s a picture of a zombie being poked in the eye with a crowbar. I think we can all get behind that, right? It’s only a “STARRING IAN McCULLOCH” short of the full zombie.

So, if it’s not sad piano music OH MY POOR CHILD BACKWARDS, what is Dead Island?

Dead Island is a game where you fall backwards a lot. That’s what Dead Island is. It’s a falling backwards slowly simulator. Interspersed with moments of picking yourself up slowly after falling backwards just to break up the monotony.

It’s one of the biggest examples of videogame bullshit made game outside of LA Noire. (I was going to talk about LA Noire at some point but I realised that would mean having to play more of LA Noire and I don’t think my tiny mind can handle it. Just imagine if someone took one of the fairly ok Sherlock Holmes games and ran with their sketchy ideas to some sort of psychotic extreme where you have to have an action for everything and “spinning an object in your hand” is seen as some sort of reasonable thing to ask a player to do and you’re still not even close to how bizarre LA Noire is. How it’s avoided the same fate as Rise Of The Robots, I do not know.)

We’re all used to videogame bullshit by now and it’s not unusual to see everything from PRESS X TO BATMAN to PRESS LB AND RB TO CRAWL SLOWLY TO INTERACT WITH THIS CINEMATIC and to want to crawl up into a ball and have a little bit of a cry. What’s interesting about Dead Island is it’s videogame bullshit that’s been stolen from elsewhere and/or inserted with so little care as to make you wonder if anyone stopped and thought “y’know, should we do this?”.

And it being a falling backwards slowly simulator, obv.

What you’ll eventually come to realise is that it’s a game with so little self awareness it won’t actually realise when it’s passed the point of taking the piss and will happily chunter onwards for fucking hours if it feels the need to. DESIGN!

It’s a grand zombie epic where you spend hours in a resort doing fetch quests for lots of people in order to get to the next segment where you leave the resort to do fetch quests for people both in the resort and outside the resort. And then when you’ve done that, you’ll have some more fetch quests to run. When the designers run out of simple fetch quests for you to do for a character, they increase the difficulty of the fetch quests by having you need to do the same thing more times. Usually after you think you’ve just completed the fetch quest by fetching what you were asked to grab.

“Hey, thanks for this item. I need another one now. SORRY! OFF YOU GO”
“FUCK YOU, VIDEOGAME”

As Rocketcatgames pointed out last night on the Twitters, Dead Island is a game about scarcity in a zombie apocalypse, where you have to root for parts and craft weapons in order to survive that comes with Diablo-esque looting systems and more suitcases per square inch than the lost property section at your local railway station after a day when everyone left their suitcases in the station after a bout of amnesia caused by aliens, all of which contain goodies.

Fuck, it’s a game about surviving a zombie apocalypse that may as well have no death state in it at all. More on that in a tic…

The Zombies are your bogstandard Bethesda enemies (as in they use the should-be-patented technique of running at you a lot for a long time). Only they make far more sense when they actually really are zombies not just so utterly unconvincing as enemies or characters or even remotely plausibly animated. I think that’s a win for Dead Island but I’m not so sure. Ask me later.

They stagger along just following you after you’ve been within range of them, there’s some humans a bit later on who shoot you but yeah, you’ve seen all this in Oblivion, in Fallout 3 and probably, I’m sure, in Skyrim too. And that’s sorta fine, I suppose.

Kicking shit out of the zombies or cleaving off their faces is, undoubtedly, where most of the love in the game has been poured. It feels good. Landing a few hits to the face, lopping arms and legs off with an electrified meat cleaver and kicking zombies in the tits never gets old. When it all comes together in a ruckus with a few zombies, it’s intense, you feel both fragile and fearsomely powerful, it works. It almost works well enough to carry the entire game. It certainly worked well enough for me to rack up over 14 hours in the game mainly just hacking up zombie limbs and decapitating passers by.

But this is also the point where the videogame bullshit completely gets the better of the game.

Because videogame says you need a death state and because this is supposed to be a zombie apocalypse you need a death state but because the game is a sprawling series of fetch quests with zombie kicking inbetween (or some zombie kicking with some fetch quests inbetween, your call) that’s ill suited to you dying – the game throws videogame bullshit in your face.

You’re constantly gaining XP and levelling up (you can tell because it flashes up the XP count for every smack in the face you give) and so are the monsters. There’s a choice that they either level up with you or just the deeper you go the higher a level you encounter but both end up in the same result. Every two minutes the game will throw a couple of enemies at you that are of lower levels and you’ll smash them apart and it’ll feel great and you’ll like it and it will be good and yay games. Then, just as you’re starting to enjoy yourself it will throw in one or more enemies of higher level that will take you down. Mainly by spawning one just behind you. Or more just in front and to the side. Or something. And you will fall over. Slowly. In a little cinematic “ow”.

This will happen every 5 minutes. Every 5 minutes you will watch an animation of yourself falling over slowly.

You will look at your healthbar and see how many blocks it has and then you will ask yourself, why is it that no matter what I do, what level I am at, the result is the same? A few hits=that fucking animation. And it very rarely doesn’t feel rigged against you. Not in an overwhelming odds way, that can be fun (see Left4Dead as a good example) but in a “THAT FUCKING VIDEOGAME” way.

Now I understand what someone meant when they stated a few months back that the arcade legacy of videogames felt crippling to them when it comes to design, a legacy of making death pretty much a requirement in game. I understand that now. I don’t think it’s the reason Dead Island is in the mess its in but yeah, it can’t have helped.

And when you do go through this faux-death, you reappear about 5 paces from where you died ready to carry on as if nothing happened. Did no-one stop and think “haaaaang on…”

But then no-one stopped and said hang on to building an entire game around fetch quests that take an increasing amount of time to complete and with very little variation between them. No-one said hang on when they lifted systems from other games, no-one said hang on when they lifted the special infected from Left4Dead and gave them a new coat of paint (seriously, there’s a big zombie that charges at you, a fat zombie that vomits on you, it’s quite shameless), no-one said hang on having the car chassis fill 70% of the screen when you clamber into a vehicle and have to drive anywhere, no-one said hang on to any of the incongruities in the design whatsoever.

And that’s Dead Island’s biggest problem. No-one ever seems to have said “hang on”, it’s stuff for stuffs sake, systems for systems sake and stuff wot we seen in other games that’s going in ours right about now even if it doesn’t fit well. Which is a shame because if they’d built something less bullshit around the fabulous slashing up mechanics, it might just have been something a bit special. Instead, it’s just a fairly overlong romp through other games in one game with a zombie skin and the only truly memorable thing you’ll encounter is that falling over animation. Over and over and over again.

It does have plenty of sad piano music though, I’ll give it that.

*where serious is defined with very strict parameters that does not and cannot include wasteful stuff like, I dunno, writing art games and things. Know your serious place, serious games people.