Skip to main content

Escape Dead Island review

Don't bother with Escape Dead Island, just run away now

Escape Dead Island
Escape Dead Island
MSRP $40.00
“This spin-off is the unambitious median point in a triple-A market saturated with zombies and stealth-action games that have narrative aspirations.”
Pros
  • Cel-shaded graphics and motion comic cut scenes give it an appealing, comic book style
Cons
  • Arduous combat and stealth mechanics
  • Boilerplate zombie narrative

Meet Cliff Calo. He’s a white, twenty-something dudebro with journalistic ambitions and serious daddy issues. Along with his sister and college roommate, he has stolen his father’s yacht in order to investigate the rumored zombie outbreak on the tropical island of Banoi.

That’s the same Banoi zombie outbreak from Dead Island, the 2011 first-person zombie survival game from Polish developer Techland. Escape Dead Island is set a few months after the first game on the nearby island of Narapela, where a sinister biochemical billionaire had the lab that created said zombie plague.

Escape Dead Island is a loose assemblage of popular tropes in contemporary gaming.

This game, developed by Swedish studio Fatshark while Yager Developments (Spec Ops: The Line) works on Dead Island 2, is a third-person adventure which dabbles in action, stealth, and story, but doesn’t get very far with any of them.

Cliff sneaks around the island in order to share evidence of the zombie plague’s genesis with the world. Also to earn the affections of his famous journalist father, who has written Cliff off as an alcoholic loser. Along the way, the junior Calo meets Chinese spy Xian Mei from the first game who gives him a couple guns and sends him to fetch a few keycards and elude or kill zombies. Audio logs and other little story collectibles litter the island to fill in the details of how exactly biomedical research led to the creation of a zombie virus.

The game doesn’t do anything you haven’t seen a hundred times in the zombie myth. The twist comes in that Cliff seems to be going insane. Either that or the island has some paranormal happenings akin to Lost–there are a few hatches around. In order to break the monotony of sneaking back and forth through the same arduously long tunnels between the island’s locations, the game occasionally slips into psychedelia. Minor lapses in memory and location grow into full-blown out-of-body episodes, fighting off zombies made of light in dreamy landscapes.

Stealth entails avoiding the zombies’ line of sight and sneaking up behind to stab them in the neck with a screwdriver that you find early in the game. Even the slowest, weakest zombies can kill you with relative ease if they get the jump on you, so often the best course of action is to avoid confrontation, or at least deal with the more challenging zombies before a fight breaks out.

That’s really all that there is to Escape Dead Island. All of the other weapons get an upgrade over the course of the game to add a little variety, but stealth remains exactly the same all throughout. It’s even the exact same stabbing animation every single time, regardless of the context.

The best way to escape Dead Island is to never land there in the first place.

Once they’re on to you it’s all smashing, slashing, and shooting. Mostly smashing and slashing because the guns are not especially useful in a tussle and the clunky animations make switching weapons mid-combat a risky proposition.

Combat is arduous. After dying you can often step back and try a slightly different approach, but some combat arenas lock you in behind invisible walls. In those situations, you can’t escape until you defeat everything or at least get the more annoying zombies to glitch themselves away or fall off a cliff. Fail a few times and the game starts tossing boxes of ammo at your respawn, as if that’s what was holding you back from beating the poorly tuned encounters. By the end of the game when it devolves into a series of psychedelic arena fights, the repetition coupled with the poor design is maddening.

Where the original Dead Island featured some depth in character and weapon customization, Escape Dead Island has only a barebones system of weapons and tools to unlock. It’s similar to Metroid or Zelda, games of that ilk, where finding a new grappling hook or gas mask sends you backtracking across the map to enter a previously inaccessible area. There’s no joy to the exploration though when the most you can expect to find in a secret room are an audio log full of zombie pseudo-science and a couple boxes of ammo.

Escape Dead Island
Image used with permission by copyright holder

There’s just no substance to any of Escape Dead Island’s elements. The stealth, combat, and story are all just enough there to hang together, but nothing more. There’s no subtlety or intrigue, no pleasure of discovery in any of it. When the game ends it loops around to start you back in the beginning with slightly more equipment and thus, different options for exploration. But between the shallow mechanics and small handful of locations, the thought of digging up more boilerplate story details is appalling. Most won’t want to continue far enough to even see the New Game+.

Escape Dead Island is a loose assemblage of popular tropes in contemporary gaming. It is the exact median point in a triple-A market replete with zombies and stealth-action games that have narrative aspirations. Protagonist Cliff Calo embodies the game’s middle-of-the-road ambitions. He is a transparent vehicle of identification for the fratty, white dudebros to whom the gaming industry’s lowest common denominator stereotype caters. This is a game dreamed up by a robot that has been fed only AAA press releases.

The best way to escape Dead Island is to never land there in the first place.

This game was reviewed using a Steam code provided by Deep Silver.

Highs

  • Cel-shaded graphics and motion comic cut scenes give it an appealing, comic book style

Lows

  • Arduous combat and stealth mechanics
  • Boilerplate zombie narrative
Will Fulton
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Will Fulton is a New York-based writer and theater-maker. In 2011 he co-founded mythic theater company AntiMatter Collective…
Red Dead Redemption is coming to Nintendo Switch and PS4 this month
red dead redemption switch ps4 release date key art

The original Red Dead Redemption is coming to two new platforms, PS4 and Nintendo Switch, later this month. It'll retail for $50 on both platforms.
Red Dead Redemption and Undead Nightmare Coming to Switch and PS4
Rockstar Games' open-world western game first launched in 2010 for Xbox 360 and PS3. It was critically acclaimed and a smash sales hit, creating a new franchise for Rockstar that could stand alongside the likes of Grand Theft Auto. It received a sequel, Red Dead Redemption 2, in 2019, but the original Red Dead Redemption remained stuck on older platforms outside of backward compatibility support on Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S.
That's why fans got excited when a rating for the game from the Game Rating and Administration Committee of Korea popped up. We've now learned that this rating is for new Nintendo Switch and PS4 ports of Red Dead Redemption by Double Eleven Studios. Red Dead Redemption will release across both of those platforms digitally on August 17, with a physical launch to follow on October 13.

It will cost $50 and includes the base campaign as well as the zombie-infested Undead Nightmare expansion; the Red Dead Online multiplayer is not included. This is the first time Red Dead Redemption will ever be on a Nintendo system, although it doesn't look like the port will have much in the way of Switch-exclusive features. That said, a press release does reveal that this will be the first version of the game to include Brazilian Portuguese, Korean, Latin American Spanish, Polish, Russian, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese localizations.
Red Dead Redemption comes out on PS4 and Nintendo Switch on August 17. 

Read more
Islands of Insight is Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom meets The Witness
An island full of puzzles appears in Islands of Insight.

Behaviour Interactive is publishing a unique new puzzle game called Islands of Insight. Revealed during today's PC Gaming Show, the title is an open-world puzzler that looks like a multiplayer spin on The Witness.

Islands of Insight | Reveal Trailer

Read more
The best weapon mods and perks in Dead Island 2
Dead Island 2 zombie

Ever since Dead Rising came onto the scene, it is almost mandatory for zombie games to include some kind of weapon-crafting system. The first Dead Island had it, and now Dead Island 2 does as well. This system lets you turn any ordinary bat or blade into an electrified powerhouse, flaming flurry, and much more. Aside from needing the materials to actually construct these mods on your weapon of choice, you also need to find their respective blueprint in order to craft it. Considering there are more 30 mods -- and even more perks -- in Dead Island 2, we don't expect you to go find them all and figure out which ones are best. You've got too many zombies to kill for that, so we've done the homework and listed all the best weapon mods and perks in Dead Island 2, plus where you can get them if you haven't found them yet.
Best weapon mods

Superior Melee Liquidator Mod
Any mod that applies the Liquidator effect to your weapon means it will start inflicting Caustic damage. While every element is useful, Caustic in particular is the top choice because there are very few zombies that are immune to this damage type. Because status effects build up based on continuous hits, this mod works best when attached to a weapon with a high rate of attack like a dagger or brass knuckles.

Read more