Escape Dead Island (Video Game)
Ted Hentschke
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Available on PC (reviewed), Xbox 360, and PS3
Rated M for Mature
Distributed By Deep Silver
I wasn’t going to beat Escape Dead Island. At about the halfway point, I figured I had seen most of what the game had to offer and was ready to sign off on a score of “surprisingly decent.” But Far Cry 4 hadn’t finished downloading yet, and there are only so many times you can masturbate before it starts to hurt, so I decided to slog through the rest as an accoutrement to my nightly alcohol consumption. Thank God I did, as it turns out that sloth would have proved my folly, as the game turns out to actually be shit. Whew, good thing too; we almost had a good Dead Island game on our hands! I’m not sure how I’d be able to fit that into my fragile world view.
For those of you that don’t know, Dead Island was an incredibly moving and powerful trailer released in 2011 that came boxed with a game that was shit. I have heard several close friends of mine say that they liked Dead Island, which is confusing since we played through the game on co-op together and all agreed it was shit at the time. I think Dead Island is a game it is easy to like in forethought or retrospect, as the concept seems enough to make all of Kickstarter throw money at their screens while screaming, “Oh God, this is the game I always wanted to make, but making games is too hard.” We all have zombie fantasies, so an open-world-melee-focused-co-op-rpg-narrative-splatterfest hits our ears like the soothing song of the sirens. And just like those sirens cries led to watery death, the call of Dead Island led to many shattered dreams.
This isn’t a review of Dead Island, but I feel that the bastard little brother, Escape Dead Island, has many of the same problems. Similar to Dead Island, I almost didn’t finish Escape because the game is tedious. The game tries to go for a MetroidVania feel, where new item unlocks throughout the game access previously inaccessible areas, but it turns out that most of the time these new items just open up more story area and not fun little extra bits. That isn’t being open world, Escape. It isn’t nonlinear to draw a line as a looping squiggle if it’s still just one line.
This wouldn’t be so bad if there was a decent way to get around the island, but even with sparse enemies and a really small map, the game manages to seriously cock it up. In between each zone, there is a very long corridor (read: disguised loading screen). Sometimes the corridor is a series of hallways, sometimes it’s going up and down some ladders, and sometimes it’s trekking up the inside of a cliff. Sometimes there are collectible unlocks in these corridors that you can access with a certain item. Remember how those Mass Effect elevators hid load times and became kind of a joke because after a certain number of rides the companions would run out of things to say? Imagine if every elevator only had one bit of dialogue, and no matter how fast your computer was, it took 3 minutes to traverse every time. That’s right; no matter how loaded the next level is or not, you have to walk through the same massive corridor every time. Since they made it a standard length, they had to make sure that even your refrigerator’s ice machine could load the whole level before reaching the other side.
And if the game were Skyrim level gorgeous, I would understand. Escape looks like someone spilled coffee on concept art on the way to a meeting, just bolded the lines around all the characters and pretended the color blur was intentional cel shading. The character models, zombie models, textures, and environments all seem to have been designed in a Monet style, but without the whole “good from far away” part. They do some interesting things with color and lighting during the dream sequences, which become the only redeeming quality of the game.
The combat is terrible. There are three whole actions you can do: Light Attack, Heavy Attack, and Dodge. You can push enemies down, but considering this only works on the basic zombies, which are crushed as easily as the emotions of my ex-girlfriend while stalking my Facebook, there is no reason to ever do this. I actually totally forgot I even could about 10 minutes into the game, and only when I accidentally pushed the button did I then try to push a zombie off a cliff to see if there was an achievement for it, realized that the invisible walls made this impossible, and never pushed the button again.
“Oh ho ho,” you say, “I’ve got you now, Ted! How can the enemies be both paper thin AND tedious?” Well, you snarky shit, because no matter how simple the task, doing it 10 bazillion times with no reward is bound to get on your nerves. Enemies don’t drop loot, and your only motivation to kill them is because the game sometimes just won’t let you run past them. To make matters worse, toward the end of the game they introduce a zombie with three elephants worth of health points that leaps across the map and can only be killed by *shocked gasp* a tedious series of swings and dodges that you have to repeat 10 times to kill it. Thank god you eventually get a shotgun that can kill it in just 8-12 shots. What a relief!
To make matters worse, you die in seconds. This is a bit of a strange decision, given that this is a melee-focused zombie game and most enemies can’t be interrupted mid attack animation. Sometimes you wade into a group of zombies and just slap away until things are dead. Sometimes they all decide to ignore the stagger effect of your weapon, and you get immediately slapped to death. And you better pray that one of the “flying dive tackle” zombies aren’t in the mix, or be prepared to get hilariously football tackled back to the last checkpoint.
Every time you die, your character shakes his head in a goofy manner and gets warped back to whatever the game considers was your last milestone. This can vary between the previous room and the entire fucking level. To make matters much, much worse, every time you die, you have to recollect the collectibles that you had gotten prior to death. Given that there are over 160 collectibles, this can be a pain. Collectibles include audio logs, postcards, different audio logs, photographs, another set of audio logs, and a “mystery set” that does something I didn’t care about. To collect photographs, Cliff (that’s the protagonist’s name, but don’t worry – I had to look it up to remember it) slowly takes out a camera, slows to a snail’s pace, and you look for things that are shining green. Doing this multiple times, especially while trying to fight off enemies, is our word-of-the-day: tedious.
There is supposedly some stealth mechanic that could mitigate this frustration, but given that zombies spawn in a semi-random pattern, it’s up to the gods to decide if the zombies will be facing you and thus unstealthable or all have their backs turned. If their backs are turned, you can slowly crawl up behind them and stab them with either the knife or screwdriver, contingent on if you have collected the hidden knife. Then you will watch your character stab the zombie in the neck, same animation every time, and will be rewarded by not having to fight that stupid enemy. Oh, unless it is one of the aforementioned trucks full of health enemies. You can’t stealth those.
It is kind of funny because I had thought that the developer, Fatshark, made actually kind of good games. Krater wasn’t exactly my cup of tea but is generally praised by people that like that sort of thing. Lead and Gold and War of the Roses are both pretty cool multiplayer games. I played Hamilton’s Great Adventure once for a Steam achievement and thought it was pretty fun. So, how exactly did this game go so terribly wrong? It is like they were all brainstorming how to maintain the authentic Dead Island feel, and between the nonsense story, terrible voice acting, atrocious level design, and terrible multiplayer health scaling, the only word they could come up with was tedious. So they wrote it on a whiteboard, circled it with a bunch of arrows, and made damn sure that every single gameplay element embodied that ideal.
So why was I about to say the game was just okay and not terrible garbage? I am a sucker for story, and it almost seemed like Escape was going to have one of those. It becomes clear very early on that your character is losing his mind, and the game goes to some steps to make this part of the gameplay. Dream sequences will happen, and levels are split up by your character falling into a deep sleep and waking up in a shipping container. There are frequent changes in the world, either subtly through growing and shrinking trees or overtly through flickering sunlight. As the game goes on, the pretenses of reality are more and more abandoned. What were once believable boss arenas become flanked by spontaneous rock formations blocking your path, all under the pretense that the world is not what it seems. You are never quite sure what is really happening, and I was compelled to find out what it was all leading up to.
The answer is nothing. It leads to no explanation, no creative twists and turns, no satisfying conclusion, and no payoff. What it does lead to is this weird Triangle time loop, but without any of the good. I won’t spoil anything, but even if I wanted to, I couldn’t. There’s nothing to spoil, no answers to reveal, no backstabbers to pre-emptively oust, no father figures who turn out to be the bad guy or bad guys that turn out to be fathers. The game is just devoid of anything. For the one solitary redeeming quality being the narrative, a failing this big is unforgivable.
It seems from starting my second playthrough that there are new things I can unlock, but frankly, I don’t care. I am sorry, Escape Dead Island, but you had your chance the first time I played through. I am not going to wade through your bullshit again to be disappointed again. If you have an alternate ending, I am going to assume it will never match up to the alternate ending I already wrote where I never played and got my hopes up for this piece of trash.
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Categorized:Horror Gaming Reviews
