The game design is phenomenal: there's a moment early on when youre standing at the top of a hillside flight of steps linking two parts of the resort and if you choose him, Sam B remarks that the beautiful panoramic view stretching out before him is like a "motherfuckin' postcard". ![]() Of course you can wander around to your hearts content bringing the noise to the infected souls roaming around Banoi, the same way you can live out your grandest criminal fantasies in GTA without being troubled by missions, but there is also close to 30 hours worth of missions to divert and distract once the pleasure of unregulated violence fades. The game is an amalgam of what has worked for survivalist action games so far - the universal weaponry gimmick of Dead Rising, the genuinely scary monsters of Left 4 Dead for instance - along with the best mission-based features of open-world staples like Grand Theft Auto. And my excitement was completely founded, because Dead Island is a breath of fresh air: it is in no way the usual hack and slash, survive at all button-bashing costs. ![]() ![]() Yes the genre has been done to death, but as with the filmic fascination with vampires, there is something extremely enduring about the simple pleasure of offing the undead, and there is still a world of possibility out there - just look at how Driver: San Francisco changed it up. How dare this first person zombie apocalypse retread aspire to something more, when it was simply going to be a dressed up Dead Rising on Holiday?! Personally, I've looked forward to Dead Island as a reinvigorated zombie slayer from the moment that first gameplay trailer hit, and any hang-over from the teaser trailer's false promises was quickly washed away with the tide when I saw the potential for gleeful head-smashing and how stunning the design work was. That teaser trailer that set the world alight all those months ago might have been an astonishing bit of marketing, but it also suggested a heavily emotive experience that the actual game didn't deliver and that encouraged a vocal and surprisingly vicious response from some elements of the media and fans. ![]() In traditional terms, the problem is usually to do with the fact that a trailer has to sell the product, even if it is an irredeemably terrible one, so there is often a degree of misdirection involved - mostly on the film side of things. Sometimes marketing can be a product's worst enemy, and the world of trailers is one that invariably muddies the waters of an audience's perception of a film or game before it sees release.
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