These end fights are an unforgivably bad decision, and while I was invested enough in Cliff's tale to power through, I imagine many people might call it quits right there. This cheap nonsense flies in the face of the story being the game's raison d'etre, and adds absolutely nothing to the dramatic value of the finale.
DEAD ISLAND PS3 AUTOSAVE SERIES
For some unfathomable reason, they thought it would be a good idea to include a series of grueling combat sequences against crowds that are much harder than anything else up to that point. However, what was a big deal was that the developers show a complete lapse of good judgment at the finale.
This stuff is hardly a big deal given the context, though. There are too many spitting zombies in "sniper" positions, and unskippable cutscenes before fights where a player is likely to die were also a bad call. The mild irritations were things like checkpoints being a little too far apart, or not being able to tell exactly when (or what) the game is autosaving. However, the developers make a few small errors in design (to be expected with a mid-lister) and one egregious one. I enjoyed the simplicity of the formula as a nice change of pace from more complex things I've spent time with this year, and Escape ended before it wore out its welcome – something I can't say about many other games lately.
In fact, playing something with such a tight focus was quite refreshing. Nothing Cliff says or does can be fully trusted, and the things that happen were more than enough to keep me interested for its brief duration. Even the way death is handled is a perfect fit - when Cliff gets killed, he wakes up as though it was just a dream. I'm reasonably certain the zombies were genuine (or were they?) but when the sun starts falling out of the sky, or when a hallway suddenly looks too much like a subway tunnel (complete with rapidly-approaching train) the player is constantly kept off-balance. The adventure starts off as expected, but it becomes increasingly more difficult to tell what's real and what's not. With the proper expectations set, Escape turns out to be a rather entertaining ride into madness. Instead, they wisely focused their efforts on making Cliff's rapidly-degrading mental state the reason to play. I don't say these as negatives, though – they get the job done satisfactorily, and the dev team would have been foolish to bite off more than they could chew. The third-person combat is basic, the stealth is rudimentary, the island is small, and the animation is limited. Once they arrive, it's not long before things head even further south than they did.Īs a mid-lister, the most important thing to know about Escape Dead Island is that it's all about the narrative. He drags a couple of friends along to play at being investigative journalists, and they "borrow" his dad's boat to get there. While all hell was breaking loose on the tropical, zombie-infested Banoi, a privileged rich kid named Cliff Calo catches wind that the nearby island of Narapela might actually be where all the trouble started. To set the scene, Escape is a sidestory tying into the plot of the original Dead Island.
That said, it stays focused on what it wants to do and offers things to chew on for players who've acquired a taste for something a bit different. It's narrow in design, limited in its features, and clearly does not have a huge budget.
Unfortunately, they're much fewer and further between these days, and when they do appear, they're slammed or ignored because they aren't as shiny as triple-A releases.Įscape Dead Island is a perfect example of the kind of mid-lister that I'm referring to. There's no strict definition of what a mid-list game is, but I think of them as titles that have small budgets and small teams, more than a few rough edges left by the time they ship, and they're usually built around one or two experimental ideas – they're bigger than indies, but definitely not triple-A.Īs someone who doesn't need the latest bells and whistles to have a good time, these were often the most interesting and exciting things to play because they took risks and tried bizarre, unproven formulas. I can't pinpoint exactly when it happened, but somewhere during the PS3/360 era, the "mid-list" game started to vanish. WTF Exactly how much rope is Cliff carrying? LOW The final sequence of battles is awful.
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