Grave Gamer News & Views — zombies

3 Things I Want from Dead Island’s Eventual Sequel Dead World:

1. A better narrative.  I was able to deal with Dead Island being more hack n’ slash than gut-wrenching emotional turmoil as the infamous backwards-motion trailer would have consumers believe.  One dimensional leads, a story I couldn’t affect, and a limp dicked ending, however, left room for a football field of improvement and left me feeling lukewarm about Techland’s brand of storytelling.

2. Better mission structure.  Borderlands is by all rights a dose of amazing yet was marred by laundry list-like missions that had you checking off fetch quests and area sweeps that never changed the path the story took like in Bethesda or Bioware’s titles.  Dead Island saw fit to mimic this approach to missions with even less success.  The core mechanics of the game – such as exploration and creating zombie crunching weapons of doom – were enough to keep me playing but there was no meat to the game besides what I was slicing through.

3. Bring on the apocalypse.  The very environment of the game – you know, a friggin’ island – limited our first hand experience to one zombie outbreak; a singular, isolated incident.  A lot of zombie games take this route, especially some of my favorites: practically every Resident Evil game is an isolated locale bombarded by the dead.  You’re stuck within the confines of a mall in Dead Rising and then a Vegas Strip-ish plaza in its sequel.  And while Valve got closer to the armageddon I wanted to go out fighting in, the focused linearity of Left 4 Dead’s levels had me yearning to see more.

I want to see a full-blown-no-turning-back-hide-what’s-left-of-the-kids-apocalypse.  Not to be mistaken with a post-apocalypse (similar to Rage or Fallout) but an end of days in progress scenario akin to Romero’s earlier undead flicks.  I want to be thrown in with emergency vehicles racing around panicked cities that are under siege from an invading force of corpses. Let there be distant fires on the horizon and chaos as far as the eye can see.  Now throw in a more varied stat leveling system, broader options for exploration, and I’ll reserve a spot in my collection for Dead World.