Dead Island

Talk about rotteny-meaty crunches and thuds. We just brained our fiftieth zombie and somehow the enjoyment of it has come back. See, after the initial thrill of such physical, solid melee smackings of all things undead, beating corpses to re-death became mundane. We were worried that the combat in Dead Island would get routine and boring quickly, but then out of the blue, as we were curb-stomping a gray-skinned woman in a bikini and then following up our foot-to-cranium with clawhammer-to-cranium, the sheer bass sound of the impact and the...

After its debut trailer shocked countless gamers, we wondered if Dead Island could possibly deliver a game to live up to the surprisingly dramatic video. That video, as well as our previous playtests, focused upon the single player experience. But at E3, we saw four-person cooperative play for the first time. Left 4 Dead with a plot, an open world and create-your-own weapons? Yes, please...

Zombies in recent games have become fodder; minor footnotes in some larger story. In Dead Rising and Left 4 Dead, “normal” zombies are like filler to keep you from getting bored between the bigger events (don’t get us wrong – we love those games). Dead Island seeks to return to the old Resident Evil model where a single zombie can be a threat. In fact, a single Dead Island zombie is probably the most deadly threat yet seen in the annals of videogame zombiedom. This game is freakin’ hard...

Much hullabaloo surrounded the recent release of the artfully constructed trailer for Dead Island, but as the internet knows all too well, a little CG trickery means naught for actual gameplay. Well, we’ve now seen how Dead Island plays, and it’s definitely promising, even if what we’ve seen didn’t have anything to do with the characters from the trailer (and we still don’t know if that actual family or those events are in the game at all). The important detail we took away from our demo is that Dead Island wants to bring the “survival” back into the horror genre...

Nope, Dead Island isnt the latest necrophilia reality show - this is a new survival horror from the makers of half-decent cowboy shooter Call of Juarez. Kind of a bloodthirsty Far Cry-meets-Lost-meets-Resident Evil, Dead Island is set on a tropical paradise that inexplicably becomes a holiday haven for a different kind of evil tourist that likes to eat brains (and leave their towels all over the bathroom floor, probably). After a plane bringing you and your wife to the island crashes, you wake