Review #216: Escape Dead Island

 Not as bad as you've been lead to believe.

 Funny story 'bout EDI, I've known about it ever since it was first announced, but I wasn't very interested in it. 'Borderlands starts the loot-based RPG FPS and Dead Island copies it, so now that they announces Tales from Borderlands, they have to make an adventure game too, boo!'. And then it released, and reviews poured in, bashing it. But I wasn't listening, I was looking at the gameplay, and it looked like something I would like to play. Turns out, it's not half as bad as they make it out to be. How many 'Worst of 2014' list had this game in them and said that 2014 sucked for gaming? If EDI made it in, 2014 mustn't have been so bad!

 Escape Dead Island begins with Cliff... no, that's not right, it begins with you playing as an Spy of sorts, out to get some mole, as you dismember every enemy in your sight with a Katana.  But once that's over, time moves forward about 6 days, where Cliff and his buddies, Devan and Linda, are on a trip to find out what happened in Banoi Island, by travelling to a neighbor island. It probably makes more sense if you played Dead Island. Disaster strikes and they lose the boat and Cliff gets hit on the head, and it all spirals down for him then. Most of the game is spent either trying to help your friends or deal with Cliff's hallucinations... or are they? The 'maybe it's a dream maybe it's not' angle is a bit cliched, but it can be done well... as for this game? It's alright. It feels a bit rushed, and you'll be able to see most of the twists coming a mile away, but it's not too bad anyways. They also integrate Cliff's apparent insanity into the gameplay, the camera angles may twists, or stuff may rain down on you from thin air. The ending is a bit... off-putting, and makes you wonder just how true is it that this game is the 'missing link' between DI 1 and Riptide.

 Unlike the other games in the series, this is not an RPG FPS. It's not an action game either, this is an adventure game with some Metroidvania elements sprinkled in. You'll come across high ledges, or chambers filled with gas that you can't explore, initially, but get your hands on a grappling hook and a gas mask, and you'll be able to explore them. However, there are no hidden optional areas or nothing of the like, these rooms just hold a few collectibles and bullets, and nothing else. Still, you are rewarded for taking your time and backtracking for them, but they are not mandatory in the slightest. And this is another thing to keep in mind, the game is mostly linear, it's always pushing you forward, you are always told where to go next, and holding L1 triggers a marker towards your destination, but you can explore on your own if you so want to, and you should! However, the in-game map is very unreliable, so hopefully you can navigate your way through, and unlike a bonafide Metroidvania, you don't open up shortcuts, so you've always gotta go through the long way.

 Why would you want to go back and explore these rooms? Well, the game has a whole slew of collectibles. Most of these are pretty much worthless, like taking photos of NPCs or random objects, for some commentary on Cliff's part, or useless postcards but there are a few, like audio logs, that deepen the narrative a bit, not that I cared too much about them. But you may come across the occasional weapon upgrade or health upgrade. The game employs a 'regenerative' health, and you are to realize how hurt you are by how red the screen gets, so it's not readily apparent just how useful the health upgrades are. Same goes for weapons, the game automatically replaces the old weapon for the new one, so you have to trust it that your new weapon is better than the last. One thing to keep in mind is that you can't manually save the game, so even if you found a new collectible, gonna have to wait until you hit a checkpoint and the game decides to autosave, which is pretty annoying in a game like this.

 Combat is... dead simple. Cliff has a Stamina gauge that is tied to Strong attacks, dashing and dodging, which is something that you need to keep in mind when engaging enemies, plus, near the end of the game, you get to choose between melee weapons, and the heavier one consumes Stamina even on weak strikes, but I digress. Weak attacks come in the form of a three hit combo, which is the same regardless of what melee weapon you are using. Eventually you'll come across a gun and a shotgun, these have their uses, like enemies on higher ground, but they are not very reliable. Early in the game, they are fairly good, but latter enemies can take a whole lot of lead. Plus, the game's framerate can be... inconsistent, which can make aiming and shooting a pain in the butt when it's crowded. And even then, it seems that guns have a rather short range, a ton of times I felt as if my bullets should've hit, yet they missed their mark. There's also some rather sloppy stealth mechanics implemented. They're never mandatory, but can make combat a whole lot simpler. By getting to an enemy's back without being noticed, you can press X to pull an instant kill... and sometimes, even if you are in front of them, you have some leeway to get to their back and instant kill them anyways! Still, stealth isn't very polished, sometimes in your favor, sometimes in the enemies', but you are not forced to use them and they can offer a bit of a break from all the fighting.

 In the entire game there's about 5 or 6 different enemy types that get progressively stronger as you go along. It'd be easy to fault it for the simple, and eventually repetitive, combat and the very few enemies you fight... but this game doesn't want to be the next God of War or Devil May Cry. This is an Adventure game, not an Action game, it's focus is on the exploring, on going through the Island, not pulling the fanciest combos and perfectly timed dodges. Which brings me to my next point, there's no Game Overs. Dying has Cliff hold his head in his hands, white out, and recover on the previous checkpoint. Enemies respawn, and you lose anything that you collected between the checkpoint and your death. What's more, lose twice in a row(Or more), and bullets will start spawning next to you. And as easy as it can be... the last stretch of the game has a rather unforgiving difficulty spike. By this time, enemies can take a whole lot of punishment, and you'll be bombarded with enemies from every side. Enemies shooting poison at you, zombies lounging at you, zombies that can hold you from behind so that others can get cheap hits in... It was borderline frustrating to be honest, but the 'infinite lives' made it somewhat tolerable.

 Now then, the game has more than its fair share of problems. Firstly, the framerate. It can't keep a stable framerate at any time. Even moving around barren areas won't be free of hiccups, and during combat it can get pretty bad if you are a gun aficionado, since it will temper with you aiming. The game has some animated 2-D cutscenes... and they all run like garbage, with stuttering audio and visuals, no in small part due to the fact that the game decides to auto-save when they are running. I also came across a couple of bugs. There's this cave, in the Beach Bar, at the start of the game, that has breakable trees coming out of it... this area has an easy-to-fall in corner of which you can't get out. I fell on it three times. Oh, and if you explore it and then try to exit it, it will spawn a breakable branch... that you can't break. You have to reload the game and then exit the cave. This happened twice. Fairly annoying. And then, during the lab sequence, the voices, during dialogue, stopped playing, eventually locking the game on a loading screen. At least it only happened once, and I didn't lose much progress.

 As for replay value, there's a bit actually. The game has a 'New Game+' feature, and apparently, it can be done up to four times, each time you'll get a new key which will allow you to access new areas. Some people speculated that finishing it four times might unlock an extra bit at the end, but I'm not interested in it, not anytime soon anyways. There's also free DLC that adds new weapons, new skins for Cliff, new areas and a new enemy type, which sounds pretty nice, but I wasn't able to try it out(Since I found out about it a bit later after I finished the game).

 I read some comments out there claiming that it looked like a PS2 game. Do you even know how a PS2 game looks? There's good and bad in the visual presentation, though. For instance, the game has a very colorful cell-shaded look, character models look a bit... off for some reason, but the Island is downright beautiful, although there are a couple of ugly textures here and there, like those of windows and glass. Zombies, as mentioned before, come in few types, and they have few 'alternate' looks as well, and they are pretty forgettable for the most part, I didn't care about these enemies in the slightest. One little detail that I loved was that every item or equipment piece that you found is equipped on Cliff, so you can see everything that he is carrying on him, which is really cool. Music on the other hand is laughable. Really, it's pretty bad, there are very few tunes in the game, and they are pretty darn bad. As for the Voice Acting, it was alright, no performance was particularly noteworthy, but I'm not complaining.

 Escape Dead Island is a horribly underrated game. It's far from being a great game, and I'm in no hurry to replay it any time soon, but I liked it a lot, technical issues not withstanding. It's a functional game, with an interesting premise and an alright execution. It was not their best first attempt at a Spin off, but I wouldn't mind seeing them explore the concept in a sequel... provided they can lock that framerate down, polish the combat and add more nuances to it, iron out the bugs, better rewards and a damned jump button!
 5.5 out of 10