Dead Island: Survivors Review

Deep Silver just released the final version of Dead Island: Survivors, a game based on the popular survival horror game, Dead Island. Granted, it does not provide the same FPS gameplay, but for a mobile game it does quite good. Dead Island: Survivors is available on both Android and iOS, has some unique features, nice graphics and can be downloaded for free.

Dead Island: Survivors

First I must admit that until today, I was completely unaware of Dead Island: Survivors. How did that happen, I don’t know, but here we are. I played the game for couple of hours and initial impressions are good, quite good.

First of all, Dead Island: Survivors is not a FPS game (sorry if you had your hopes up), but a mixture of hack ‘n’ slash and tower defense genres. You do control a hero, but at the beginning you only have one choice, Sam B. the angry tank dude that really likes blunt weapons. A short prologue puts you right on the beach of the first island, where you get to smash some zombie heads immediately. After clearing it up, you are introduced to your base where you can start building paths for zombies by placing defense tower and walls.

From here on it’s all up to you. After each successful mission you get a lootbox (suitcase to be more precise), some money and building materials. Lootboxes can be opened for upgrade cards, even more cash or other goodies that you can use to improve yourself or the base. Opening suitcases is instant (5 seconds) on the first island, but the timer goes up further down the road. It can take hours or even days to open some of the better lootboxes later in the game. But you won’t have to worry about that for a while, after all the first island is like a tutorial and for better or worse, you can’t skip it.

When you are done completing the first tutorial island, the map opens up and takes you to another island. The base that you had is gone, but all the upgrades are not. From this point on, you can invite friends to join you and build their bases on the same island. Luckily you won’t be starting from scratch as there is a basic layout of towers already in place.

Beside the tower defense missions, there are loot missions as well. The goal varies from one to another, but in a nutshell, you are on your own (without your towers) and it’s up to you to complete the main goal, avoid (or kill) zombies and receive the rewards in the end.

Graphics and Controls

Despite the transformation from FPS to Action/TD game, Dead Island: Survivors somehow manages to keep the similar atmosphere from the main game. This is partially due to the graphics and the artwork style the developers used. Everything is cartoony, but also bloody at the same time. All the characters are there, their icons weapons as well.

Controls on the other hand can be a hit or miss for some players. They are touch-only / tap to move and there is no option for turning on virtual joystick and buttons. This means that everything, including using all of the special abilities is gesture based. This is a problem when you are facing a group of zombies and need to use drag or slide gestures as quickly as possible. No matter how quick your fingers are, tapping a single button will always be better.

Dead Island: Survivors is a fun game to play, there is no doubt about that. The free to play mechanics are fair, there are no ads showed up your face and the progress (at least in the first couple of hours) seems reasonable. Of course, if you like you can speed things up by spending some cash in the in-app store, but that’s entirely up to you. The only thing I didn’t like is the previously mentioned gesture based gameplay, but since this is only version 1.0, maybe the developers will add virtual controls in the upcoming updates.

The game is quite big (about 1.1GB after the in-game download) and will run on Lollipop Android devices or later. The graphics settings can be changed between low, medium and high, so the game should be running on midrange devices without a problem.  Achievements and Google Play support are implemented as well. To download and try it yourself, follow the link to the Play Store below.

P.S. No, I don’t know where Dead Island 2 is.

Dejan Balalovski

UPDATE: It seems that the game was removed from the Play Store. Download Dead Island Survivors APK here.