50%PC

This game was great up until Act II where most of the stuff became repetitive and the story became more cliché. Additionally, the combat was uninteresting and was essentially just a glorified looter shooter. Weapons also break too easily and cannot withstand hordes of zombies. There is also something with this game's motion blur that makes me nauseous.

40%PC

many bugs left, story was meh, gameplay was hard to get into coming from DI2. Lack of proper dodge / block was a shit show. Weapon balance (without fan mods) was abysmal and the quest design was awful. For its time, this was probably fun but in 2025 - not recommended at all.

50%PC

Weak story, characters, animations and overall gameplay, but chopping zombie limbs can be quite fun.

60%PlayStation 4

Too time consuming for whar it offers

50%Xbox One

возлагал большие надежды но обломался
есть крутые механики но здесь такой скучный сюжет что тебе вообще не хочется по нему идти

30%PC

One of the worst story writing I've ever seen, but it has fun gore and hack-and-slash gameplay. However, it gets too repetitive since there's no story to back it up. Plus, there are a lot of repetitive and boring missions. The main missions feel like side quests get items, kill zombies, get items, kill zombies etc.

70%PC

Fun to play with friends but nothing special

70%PC

Played back in 2011 when it released, had fun with it. Played it again this year, also had fun, gets old pretty fast though, very fun when playing multiplayer.

80%PC

Dead Island is a fun game I never played riptide all i know it is very similar dead island has good mechanics amazing graphics and a decent story I give dead island a B

70%PC

Has many good functions and are at times a really great game with a
good story. BUT it takes to much time doing relative repetitious
missions, there are too many significant bugs (like zombies hitting
trough a closed door) and the game play is not superb in itself.

The levelling systems has a few problems, like that at times fighting ordinary zombies can actually become harder as they level up along with you and that the new skills you get and new weapons you access is not always equally good.

The story is pretty good and has many interesting characters (and a lot of uninteresting ones too) and it contains some of the same classic left-wing and social critical points that the classic zombie movies and games also did.

All in all its worth playing but there are better ways to use your time.

75%PC

I replayed Dead Island on the Steam Deck. It’s my first time soloing it. It’s a lot easier with friends. It still looks good and sounds great. Movement and combat take some practice. Cutscenes have not aged well. Still overall a fun time.

40%PC

Aged like fine milk.
I used to love this game back when it first came out but time has not been gentle to this game.
It's still super buggy, arguably moreso than the original release, there are so many areas with waaaaay too many zombies.
Moresby specifically was an absolute nightmare to get through.
Do yourself a favor and just buy Riptide or 2.

65%PC

The story was alright. The gameplay was fun but I picked the wrong starter character and only realized it 11 hours into the game which is why I ended up stopping.

50%PC

good gameplay isn't enough for the lack of good story in this case

70%PlayStation 4

Fun game to play coop with a friend but I imagine it would get boring solo.

85%PC

+ Great game for Co-op
+ Combat
+ Content
+ Great quality for an older game
+ Weapon customization
+ Setting

- Storyline - it's not bad but could've been better

100%PC

game was amazing, i have nothing bad to say about it except riptide was better

50%PC

If you prefer being more of a lap dog than a badass zombie exterminator, then this game is for you. Not only that there's practically only one character worth playing, but the majority of your time will be spent being someone's bitch. When not bending over for quests, you will experience being ass fucked anyway by the increasingly challenging zombies because, oh no, you picked a character that is not Sam B. The overall story is laughably mediocre, with a twist that you can see a mile away. Moments that are supposed to be dramatic are ruined by odd pacing and downright stale dialogue. The ending is like an abrupt punch to your face, reminding you that you just wasted your time playing this co-op game that you're not really supposed to play alone.

40%PC

playing dead island for the length of time I have is the equivalent to smoking a pack of cigarettes every day for 40 years

50%PC

Dead Island shows its age now as combat and traversal proved rather clunky and dated, though visuals still hold up. Story started off as a run of the mill zombie outbreak but got a little crazy when i started fighting tribal gangs in the jungle.

40%PC

Although it gained lots of attention at its launch time, dated gameplay mechanics alongside with dreadful writing made the game age poorly. It's fun with friends at least, but I wouldn't imagine myself playing this game singleplayer.

90%PC

this is the best zombie apocalypse game i’ve ever played. i’d definitely recommend and play this one again

5%PC

If I could give this game a 0%, I would. The co-op is literally the only decent thing about this game. Garbage story, garbage devs, wildly misogynistic voice lines.

60%Xbox One

Good zombie game with a fun setting.

60%PC

Solid game with a decent story don't think its worth more than one playthrough and the arena is just boring.

80%Linux

I really enjoyed the original version of Dead Island so when a Linux version of the Definitive Editions was made and went on a deep discount I couldn’t pass it up. Overall I would say that there wasn’t much difference from the normal version. The graphics are a bit better but it’s not like the graphics of the old version were bad. The gameplay is pretty much the same. If you have never tried the old version then I would say to give this a go if you enjoy co-op games or just first person action games in general. I played through solo and had a blast. I never felt like there was a point where the game needed you to have a group of human players to progress. Everything felt doable solo which is something some co-op themed games will fail in.

You get to pick from 4 characters to play as. Their backstories don’t really matter because they don’t get much explanation in game. What will matter is what kind of playstyle you prefer. Each character has a different speciality for weapons whether it be blunt weapons, edged weapons, guns, and throwable weapons. You will gain XP for completing quests and killing zombies. You can then use those points to upgrade various skills. It really does a good job of allowing you to tailor the upgrades to how you want to play. There is also a fury mode which when enabled will send you into a frenzy where you can do much more damage then normally which is very useful on hordes or mini boss type enemies. I picked Xian whose speciality was edged weapons. It is very satisfying to hack off zombie legs, arms and heads. When using blunt weapons you can also crush their skulls and bones.

There were a few negatives along the way. I pretty much had to turn enhanced navigation on. With it on it literally gives you a line to follow to your next objective on your map. I don’t like this type of handholding but with it turned off the objective marker on the map would often dissappear for me. I would rather have my hand held then have no idea where to go next. There were also a few points in the game where enemies could shoot me through walls. I could also shoot them but would have no idea they were there until they began shooting because I can’t see though walls. There was also a glitch in the jungle level for a bit. Basically for the first bit in the jungle there were no fast travel options to that area and some side missions would send me back to other areas. I could then not be able to travel back to the jungle once complete. I had to quit the game and reload it and would be auto inserted back in the jungle with my progress intact. This issue went away about halfway through the jungle section. There was also a flickering issue. It would happen maybe once every few hours for about 2-3 seconds and then go away so it wasn’t a major hassle but it is still a bug.

I played Dead Island Definitive Edition on Linux. It may not show it on Steam but I purchased this game back in 2016. I am just getting around to playing it now due to an issue where the game would crash before loading the main menu. At first I just put the game on the back burner expecting the glitch to be ironed out. I kept reinstalling the game to see if it was fixed but several years later, updates to game, kernel, Mesa drivers, and trying several different distros and the game still had this issue. I finally put time into solving it. What was the cause was a file called “LibGL.so”. The game was made to only work with a specific version of that file. As you can imagine over the years updated versions of that file have been made. The game will crash with anything newer than that version and no distro I tried uses a version that old. The file is also not included with the game, it uses whichever version your OS has installed unless the older one is present. I had to download a copy of the correct version file and drop it into the game folder. Once I did this the game launched just fine. The performance was great as well. I ran the game maxed out at 1080P and my FPS was usually 80-100 or higher. It supported framerates above 60 which was fantastic. There was no manual saving but the game auto saves after every completed task so it isn’t terrible although I would prefer manual save. There was support for Vsync, one AA setting, one ambient occlusion setting, as well as 7 other settings to tweak. Alt-Tab worked just fine. The game did crash once but just the one time and no more. Not bad for how much time I put into it. My CPU usage during gameplay was usually around 30%, my system RAM usage was usually around 5GB and my VRAM usage was usually around 2.2GB. The game took up 9.22 GB of storage and uses Techland’s own engine called Chrome Engine 5. I played version 1.1.2 of the game.

I paid $3.30 CAD for Dead Island Definitive Edition. I can say that for how much fun it was it is easily worth $50 CAD. If you enjoy action games, co-op games, zombie games, give it a try if you haven’t already.

80%PC

Muy buen juego, pero cuando mas se disfruta es en el modo cooperativo.

60%PC

The game has a good exploration and level design, even though it has poor system management but the game is well enjoyed.

50%PC

6/10 if played in coop.

50%PC

Mid. Driving is not great and the zombies are damage sponges

80%PC

+ never had to manage inventory
+ okay to only do story quest
+ okay to skip cut scenes
+ never got lost
+ got a good tan

80%PC

Required lot of modding to be playable.
Endless regeneration of the same zombies on the same places kills immersion.
Shooting guns is rather unpleasant and unrealistic experience.

70%PC

Last played: Monday, 8 May 2017

80%Xbox Series X/S

Adictivo y buen juego.

80%PC

The zombies were actually pretty scary.

40%PC

This game was part of my childhood during the xbox 360 era, and tbh I always thought that this game was always better then dying light in terms of gameplay, story and character... until I played this game again with friends. This game imo has not aged very well and it becomes painfully obvious when you compare it to the spiritual successor of Dying Light (even though that game also had its issues).

Story
The story was just terrible LOL. Easily the most forgettable part of this whole game. Many of the actions the characters do are either painfully obvious, or painfully stupid. It didn't help that the mocap/animations for this game didn't age the best, so everyone seemed like they had a stick glued to the back of themselves, and did everything they could to make sure that stick never broke. The ending especially was just pretty bad, but around act I, act II, and a few moments of act III the story had many good moments. But act IV was just terrible and really ruined the story as a whole for me.

Characters
The characters for me are pretty recognizable as I used to spend hundreds of hours with them during the 360 era. However really looking into the characters and seeing them without the nostalgia goggles, they really sucked in terms of how they were presented. Many of them seemed so two dimensional, and would make poor decisions that was just so painful to sit through. Riptide def fleshed them out more, but the main cast was just way too stiff for my liking. The side characters that weren't in act I were just plain bad. They either had 0 character, or died after you left them for 10 minutes.

Gameplay
The gameplay for this game is honestly, still pretty good. However now that dying light is out which improved the game tremendously, the gameplay is just ok. I don't know if it was just me, but the zombies in this definitive edition just felt SOOO light, and I could kick them away for days without worry at all. Other aspects like no dropkick, and a meh skilltree led to the game just feeling like it was missing something that dying light filled. It's a shame cause this formula was where it all started, but newer games imo have just done it better now.

Tone
This is an extra point for this game, but the tone of this game was just all around the place. It seemed like it wanted to be taken seriously, but the poor animations, story telling and decision making just made this game a comedy instead. I know the developers changed the tone last minute cause it was supposed to be more comedy, but the dark tone just didn't work well for me and I love those types of story telling. Many of the moments in the story were too cliche for me to worth caring for.

Last notes
This game, playing it again, just showed me how painfully average it was. The endgame just seemed like it wouldn't be as fun as other games would be, and even though I have experienced maxing out my character in the 360, I just don't see myself doing it for this game. It really sucks because I held high praise for this game I used to play, and to realize just how PAINFULLY average it was, it really makes me wish I just didn't play it again.

Saving Grace
This game's coop mode is honestly pretty fun and the only reason why I would recommend this to anyone. The difficulty however is obvious that it wasn't scaled for coop, but the laughs you can get from this game makes up for the easy difficulty of this game. Death doesn't matter cause you respawn, zombies can easily be swarmed by the players and the 4 combined abilities makes this game a pretty easy cakewalk. So if you play this game solo, the difficulty is def much more fun in terms of gameplay, but the poor character, story and a bit poorly aged combat system compared to newer titles makes this really hard to recommend solo. But with coop I think it has its worth.

Conclusion
I am a bit disappointed to see just how average this game really was. Maybe it was due to my friends not caring for the story, so I was left with being rushed to do the story dialogue. However I do feel like if I TRULY invested into the story it still wouldn't be close to a memorable story as any other game I have played.

Kinda of a shame
4.5/10, may have its worth if you play in COOP, but single player just buy dying light... which also has a poor story LOL.

100%PC

10/10

20%PlayStation 4

This game is fucking atrocious. Sure, it has some good-looking environments, but everything else is complete dogshit. It's a boring shoot-and-looter with enemies who are damage sponges, a nonsensical, obviously padded plot, and pointless, grindy side missions. The game is cynical, offensive, and utterly disrespectful of the player's time. By the time I truly realized how much I hated it, I felt like I had sunk enough time into it to try and finish it up, but my opinion only worsened with each passing moment.

70%PC

yeah

60%Xbox One

First person zombie games are your thing? This is a good game, but with a generic zombie story. As long as you can tolerate weird visuals that cause more eyestrain than anyone should suffer through in a 20+ hour game, you'll enjoy it.

70%PlayStation 4

7/10

70%PlayStation 4

Interesting beginnig. It gets repetitive. Dificulty goes up quite well.
No one tells you that you can play villain story.

90%PC

Graphics are awesome (not the character faces), the game mechanics works well, fun to play. Multi has some moments too.

30%PC

Dziełko polskiego Techlandu wydane przez Deep Silver w 2011 r. Pierwszoosobowa (FPP) gra akcji z elementami strzlanki I RPGa w klimacie post-apo z zombie. Mimo niezłego początku, gra na dłuższą metę jest cholernie nudna z kiepwską fabułą i rozczarowującym finałem. Widać, że stworzona pod koop. Zombie respią się na potęgę, spluwy nie mają mocy, ludzie są głupsi od trupów i jeszcze problemy techniczne.

70%PC

+ vastly improved graphics
+ 4 characters with their own perks
+ 3 large open areas to explore
+ craft-system with blueprints
+ medkits don't take up space
+ very fast loading times
+ includes the Bloodbath Arena DLC
+ easy drop-in / drop-out coop system
+ impressive gore / limb effects
+ more infected types as you progress
+ catchy opening song
+ 3 skill trees
+ all cutscenes skippable
+ fast-travel
+ cars included

- can be highly repetitive
- no real daynight-cycle
- atrocious writing
- flat-as-paper characters
- stiff models
- Purna doesn't shine until a third into the campaign
- no FOV slider
- cars useless in town due to clogged up streets
- boring fetch quests
- human AI beyond stupid

Final Verdict: 75% (good)

90%PC

By and large this is, indeed, the enhanced edition of the game – Boring and obvious to point this out but it's true. The load times are vastly quicker, the performance is smoother, the visuals sharper, slight gameplay tweaks are welcome, and the inclusion of the bonus content is great, even if this content itself is notably inferior to the main game itself. The only change that I distinctly do not like is that the Challenges seem to offer vastly fewer XP; like, not by half but literally by like 10-20x. One thing I did seriously appreciate was that they incorporated the Riptide element where running over zombies is usually an instant kill, even with thugs, and this is so much more fun than the run-enemy-over-5-or-6-times-to-kill-them setup from the original. It doesn't “fix” the game, however, for those that hated it – I loved the original Dead Island and really, this game is just for those of us that were fans of the original; it's the same game, just better and larger. If you think zombies suck and you like killing them, a single playthrough will allow you to literally rack up a few thousand kills; there's a bit of human vs human, but this is literally only about 1% of the action, and luckily, the enemy isn't a bunch of Captain Planet villains – the zombies aren't just an obstruction to your ultimate goal of stopping your enemy, they ARE the enemy, which frankly, in 2018, feels very refreshing.