Mainly stuff like Asura's Wraith, Conan, Alone in the dark 2008, but the one I wanted to try the most
was the cel-shaded spin off to Dead Island, known as Escape Dead Island. Now my experience with Dead Island wasn't a lot, I played the first game for an hour and didn't play enough of it. It does sound pretty interesting with it's weapon crafting system, but that's all I can say for it. However, I can say I am quite intrigued with the upcoming Dead Island 2.
Several months after trailers for Dead Island 2 appeared, a trailer for Escape Dead Island and it caught my interest, not a lot, but it looked like it wanted to be more Tripier version of the last of us with some cel-shading. I didn't follow much on the game after that, until the game got released and hearing rather negative things about it, which usually catches my interest, since I like experiencing poorly made games for some reason.
So was it as bad as people say or is it a fairly competent game? at least in terms of what I have experienced.
The story puts you in the role of cliff who is with 2 of his college friends who go on an island filled with zombies, because they wanna do some sort of coverage of it. Well then their boat gets destroyed and cliff is recovering, while experiencing several hallucinations throughout the story.
so far, cliff has encountered Xian from Dead Island 1 for some reason and it just revolves on them trying to escape the island. The plot is so far nothing all that special, it has a few interesting points, but I doubt they will get build on later.
The visuals are kind of iffy, now I do appreciate the devs were trying to do a cel-shaded game, but it just looks kind of unfinished, the shadows are blurry,some jagged edges, etc. Maybe if there was more polish it might have a chance of looking pretty good like most cel shaded games. However that's not the only issue, the game also has some frame rate drops and also screen tearing(mostly in the comic panel esc cut scenes). Animations on the other hand are pretty decent, some of the time it looks stiff, but on other times it looks reasonably smooth. Now I did mention hallucinations, but for what I have encountered they are interesting to watch, but it didn't happen that much.
The sound is decent, Music does it's job, but it isn't anything note worthy so far. The voice acting can be hit or miss, some performances are decent, but others are just laughably bad. However the sound effects are pretty good, having a nice punch to it specifically the attack sounds.
Now the real treat of this game is the game, and by treat I mean it somewhat fails. Now the game is a hybrid of beat em up,third person shooting,survival horror, and adventure game elements. The actual adventuring is fairly decent offering some interesting things along the way. The survival mechanics work in the sense that health packs and ammo is scattered and you have to conserve like in any other survival horror game.
Now you will encounter zombies by stealth killing them or going full blown zombie massacre time on them.
The actual stealth is acceptable, but nothing mind blowing, mainly since zombies are that not smart to notice you. The actual melee combat is very simple, you can do light and a heavy attack with no combos, as well as dash attacks(which will insta kill an enemy), and also executions. You also have guns which are useful, but don't do much more damage than the melee weapons, then again up to this point I have been using a pistol.
This all doesn't sound so bad, I mean the Dead Rising has rather simple combat, but unlike Escape Dead Island there is a lack of weight with the weapons, making each encounter with the zombies rather dull.
It also doesn't help the missions revolve around go there,do this, get this kind of missions.
I think one of the bigger middle fingers is the game's loading times and checkpoints, because the loading times are rather long and also the checkpoints are placed in the worst possible ways.
So far, I can say Escape Dead Island is rather Below average, It has good ideas of it's own but it's hardly executed well and just ends up being kind of a chore. It has a few shining points, but I can't call it good, but I can't call it bad ethier. It just ends being a really average experience at least so far, maybe it does get worse, but as of now it's just mediocre.
