Dead Island

OK, yeah I'm a bit behind, but I've just got around to watching the Dead Island trainer (which can he found here), for the last few days I've heard numerous accounts of how disturbing it is, how it's plain wrong and should be banned... all the usual random stuff from people who are desperate to desynthesize everything to the content of Miffy and Friends.

However, deciding not to let people form opinions for me, as I very rarely do to be fair, I watched it. I can only say it was very effective, the setting of a family making a last stand against the fairly standard zombie enemies was very good. It gave it more of a sense of familiarity in it's setting than normal game trailers and to be 100% honest there was a hint of emotional reaction on my part, which doesn't happen often.

However, clearly it's been set out to do this, to try and get a reaction from the, everything must be PG brigade, to try and evoke a response and use the inevitable Internet banter to build hype and generate publicity. There's no possible way the developers could have thought featuring the death of a small child in the trailer (who was clearly already a zombie) would invoke any other kind of reaction. My reaction to this is, do they lack confidence in the game itself to get good reviews and build it's own hype.

The style of the trailer is somewhat unlikely to be indicative to the actual game play (haven't seen that much in action yet despite having a quick nose round youtube for a few videos), which will doubtless be a fairly standard FP, zombie slasher type game, and to be honest the trailer hasn't done much to get me excited or interested. My rule of thumb is if you need that much publicity, you probably don't deserve it.

I'm of course ready to be proved wrong by amazing reviews, but you wont find me holding my breath.