Being a rabid zombie fan, I was naturally drooling from the moment I first heard about Techland’s upcoming zombie/survival horror title, Dead Island. After being shown some of the first level today at GC, I just wish it was 2008 already.

The story begins with a plane crash over a remote, tropical island. You wake up on a beach, with your wife nowhere to be seen. Surrounded by a luxurious hotel resort, you immediately notice another thing has gone very wrong indeed - zombies are everywhere.

There are four goals to Dead Island - survival, locating your wife, determining what on earth is going on, and finally, getting the hell off the island. Over the course of the game you will come across two rival groups of human survivors - you can ally with the group of your choice, or choose to stick it out alone.

While there are guns available in Dead Island, it’s not a first-person shooter - product manager Pawel Kopinski calls it a first-person melee fighting game. You’ve probably heard about the real-time deformation engine of Dead Island, but if not, the zombies consist of three layers - bones, muscle and skin. Finally seeing this in action was a real treat - Pawel put it best when he said you can “make a great mess.”

Call me brutal if you must, but I just don’t see this game getting boring.

The game is slated for a 2008 release, as Techland are still searching for a publisher - will someone give these guys a fat wad of cash already?

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This entry was posted by Tim Hanlon on Thursday, August 23rd, 2007 at 11:16 pm and is filed under Previews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.