The things you'll do as Cliff aren't much better. Xian Mei, one of the playable characters from the first Dead Island, appears occasionally as one of your mission guides. He's got the soul of Dapper Laughs, the face of X Factor's Rylan Clark and is dressed as Tidus from Final Fantasy X. Cliff isn't just a boisterous bro stuck in a bad place, he's a weird preening idiot whose unpleasant personality is magnified by the game's ugly cel-shaded aesthetic. Escape Dead Island even cribs Far Cry's hallucinatory flourishes, with multiple surreal scenes, on-the-nose dream sequences and reality-bending edits to portray Cliff's fragile mental state. Cliff is a rich white kid who wants to prove his worth to his media tycoon father by dragging two friends to the supposedly deserted island of Narapela in search of The Truth.Ĭliff's arc is fairly obviously inspired by Far Cry 3's Jason Brody, another tired rehash of the old Heart of Darkness motif, as the privileged white westerner descends into the jungle and is immediately forged into a hardened warrior. You're then placed in control of Cliff Calo, another example of gaming's bizarre obsession with casting obnoxious jerks as the hero character. This game is a big step down for the studio.įollowing a brief prelude, which sets up the tiresome corporate conspiracy plotline and threatens to make Dead Island's slim backstory as garbled and idiotic as Resident Evil, events fast forward to six months after the events of the original game, as the whole world wonders what happened in this now-quarantined archipelago. Developer Fatshark is best known for the wonderfully daft multiplayer romp War of the Vikings. Beyond the concept of zombies on a tropical island, a tangential cameo and the occasional pile of suitcases, it could easily be related to one of the dozens of other cheap zombie games that have shambled into view over the last few years. It's actually hard to work out why this game even exists, since its relationship to the core Dead Island series is tenuous at best. That franchise will decay into slime all too quickly if clunkers like Escape Dead Island are what publisher Deep Silver has in mind, however. Both games outstayed their welcome in the long run, but offered enough mid-tier laughs to justify the start of a new franchise. Neither game was what you could call polished, but developer Techland compensated - sometimes overcompensated - by filling the cracks with gallons of loot, outlandish weapon crafting and knockabout four-player co-op. The original Dead Island and its hurried semi-sequel Riptide got a lot of mileage out of this loophole. And they're always falling to bits, so it doesn't really matter if textures and models are crude. They're famously dim-witted, so bargain basement AI and wonky pathfinding is easily masked inside the fiction.
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