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Escape Dead Island
Escape Dead Island is a Survival-Mystery adventure that follows Cliff Calo, who sets sail to document the unexplained events on Banoi. Arriving on the island of Narapela, he finds that not everything is as it seems. This title lets players delve into the Dead Island universe and unravel the origins of the zombie outbreak. Escape is just the beginni...
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Escape Dead Island Reviews
Professional reviews from gaming critics
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.
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...
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.
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.
These individual parts feel like they should have led to a better game, but Escape Dead Island can never really seem to decide what it wants to be when it grows up. With a little more attention to the insanity aspect of the game and a greater feeling of actual dread and tension, Escape Dead Island could have proven memorable. In the end however, it is a game that leaves you basically going through the motions to get through a relatively short tale that has moments of intrigue, but otherwise falls flat.
“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”.
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.