Bleak Doesn't Begin To Say It: Dead Island
It's been quite a while since a trailer made me say, "Wow." And indeed since one made me gasp, "Oh my God." This CGI teaser for Dead Island - a zombie game originally announced in 2007 - is both stunning and horrendous. Bleak like your puppy dying of tiredness is bleak. The game itself sounds absolutely fascinating. An open-ended sandbox zombie survival game, first-person but with an emphasis on melee combat, where you must try to survive for as long as possible on an infested New Guinea island. We have little more to go on, other than the knowledge that Deep Silver are publishing, and that the people behind it are capable of a trailer as brilliantly morose as the one below.
There's also word of it containing those infamous "RPG elements", and oddly for a supposedly open-ended sandbox game, a focus on story. The melee is said to let you pick up almost any object you find, Dead Rising-style. And according to IGN who bring us all this info and lots more, because it's set on a tourist tropical island, the place isn't littered with high grade weaponry and ammo caches. Instead it's about foraging and improvising with what you can find.
There's to be drop-in four-player co-op should you wish to work together, or it works perfectly well in single player mode for lone survivors. And according to IGN, it's "disgusting". They've got a ton of screenshots and artwork over there.
It's set for a 2011 release, but nothing more specific than that. Hopefully we'll be seeing something from inside the game soon enough. As a concept, it sounds fascinating - just hardcore surviving, improvising, scrabbling to keep going. It's what zombies were made for.