Escape Dead Island

The best word to describe Escape Dead Island is “cheap”. Certainly not cheap to buy, as I see it’s £34.99/$39.99 on Steam, but certainly cheaply and quickly made. The island of Narapela is quite small and painfully linear but the gameplay time is padded out by Fatshark forcing you to run through entire boring sections more than once, with added crappy checkpointing for good measure. It can be enjoyable in a basic, average way, and the “sanity effects” the game throws at you are the...

Seeing an island paradise brutally corrupted is unsettling; seeing our lead character’s mind fall to pieces, even more so. While Escape Dead Island’s workmanlike combat and ho-hum zombies fail to fully capitalize on this unoriginal but respectably executed premise, it does manage to punctuate its enjoyable filler with some genuinely spectacular moments of madness. [Note: Escape Dead Island is also available on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.]

Escape Dead Island is a game with a lot of potential that ultimately disappoints.

Life-less ordinary.

Escape Dead Island disappoints on multiple levels, from its lackluster gameplay, to its awful storytelling. The revelations found in this game are not profound enough to justify the long slog, filled annoying characters and lousy stealth and combat systems. Not to mention the ending is insultingly stupid and lazy. The best way to escape this island is to never visit it.

“This spin-off is the unambitious median point in a triple-A market saturated with zombies and stealth-action games that have narrative aspirations.”

If you’re a fan of the zombie genre or if you’re a fan of the Dead Island games, avoid Escape Dead Island; trust me when I say you won’t be missing anything and you will save yourself hours of frustration and quite a headache. The game is flawed and should be a lesson on how not to tell a story. Even when you want to be cryptic of deep you should never ever do what this game does, especially in that same fashion AND, I can’t shake this off my head, with the cheap gimmick in the post-credits “scene”.

But this isn't 1999, and even where third rate franchise filler is concerned, standards are now higher than a game of Escape Dead Island's shoddy construction could ever reach. With a dash more ambition, and a lot more technical coherence, at best it would only have been a middling distraction before next year's Dead Island 2. In its current form, the kindest thing would be a short, sharp stab with a screwdriver behind the ear.

Like I said, I could go on, but I'm gonna stop there. Frankly, Escape Dead Island doesn't deserve another second of my time, and I hope to all that is holy it doesn't get a single second of yours.