Dead Island-The Future of Zombies?

The best vacation you ever had.

So if you haven't heard about Dead Island yet, you are in for a treat. Its a new Zombie game developed by Techland and published by Deep Silver, set to be released some time this year for PS3, Xbox 360, and PC. They released the announcement trailer on Tuesday and I about pissed myself. The trailer has a song that reminds me of the "dramatic theme song" from Lost. Its really pretty and carries a lot of intense emotion with it. Enough about the song. The scenes of the trailer are INTENSE!!! They are edited in a sort of reverse chronological mix-matched order and it really adds to the drama depicted in the trailer. It shows a family fighting off a mini-horde in hotel room and man... it looks so chaotic and desperate. As if that wasn't enough to wet my whistle, the article IGN sealed the deal. Techland is saying that the game is going to be a "first-person zombie-slasher/action-RPG."

There is going to be limited guns and ammo, which means that combat is going to be mostly melee. "Knives, machetes, bats, broomsticks, pipes" is what you'll have to work with. Which reminds me a bit of Monolith's Condemned: Criminal Origins. In that game you had to search around eerie buildings trying to solve murders and fight off serial killers with mostly melee weapons that would degrade over time. Sounds like Techland is going for a similar combat system. So for those of you who haven't played Condemned, that type of combat is intense and makes for a lot of "OHSHIT!" moments when your weapon breaks halfway through a fight; hopefully we can expect the same from Dead Island.

Another big plus for this game so far is that its going to have four player cooperative, which I think we all can appreciate in a Zombie game. Killing zombies is great fun--add a few of your buddies and you have yourself a Zombie slaying bonanza.

We had a thread before under the Were Zombies Over-saturated This Year? post I did a while back, and in that post we were talking about how to keep Zombies games/movies fresh and exciting. I would be interested to see Techland's take on storyline. I hope its not just another unexplained Zombie apocalypse on a resort island with a few modifications to gameplay---LAME. However, if the trailer is any indication as to how the game plays, I would say this game is going to explode heads.

But what say you fellow slayers? Sound good?