Does anyone know much about the weapons? What's the colour significance and would I create better mods by using better base weapons?

Are the weapons ordered at all? I'm finding comparing weapons rather slow and annoying.

Ok, let me stick down some points from the Edge review; can you all tell me if these have been fixed?  If so, I might give it another shot.

For a game built primarily around melee combat, the swinging arc is an inexact science. Some blows clip enemies visibly out of reach, while others refuse to snag bodies filling the screen. The vital kick move, handily knocking attackers down, sees the player’s leg constantly alter its length. Sometimes we are lanky Bruce Campbell, at others a wee Sarah Michelle Gellar. 

That one sounds relatively serious.  You're all talking about the melee stuff being pretty satisfying, so have they worked that one out?  They also mention an inconsistent auto-aim frustrating things.  What have they done to the combat system?

The survival fiction is particularly inept. Items respawn after a short window of time, lending infinite resources to a narrative that trades on desperate struggle. On a micro level, it leads to the absurd. Characters cry about dehydration as energy drinks lie at their feet, while tricky supply runs sit at odds with the infinite quantity of canned food in the room next door. 

This just seems silly and immersion breaking.  Sure, if you're playing it to laugh at characters flying through cars like some are, that's fine, but doesn't this sort of irritate?  Doing supply runs when you could just use one of your weapons to open the 10 000 tins of beans next door?

Ongoing trade missions can be exploited as XP mines, while weapons need never go blunt thanks to endless trading funds. Only an awkward shopping interface dissuades such underhand play – every item has to be sold one unit at a time. Selling 17 magnets in a row is a true survival horror.

Improvements to the shopping interface?

Enemies also magically reappear in precisely the same locations. Banoi operates with the mechanical efficiency of a ghost train: you mentally map which corpses suddenly spring to life and note the back alleys that lead to bigger brute types. 

This seems like another big dealbreaker; I remember them talking about certain characters essential to the storyline winding up as zombies, and when you agonisingly have to kill them, they're just there ready to pop up again once you've been out of the area and back again.  Does it feel remotely organic like Left 4 Dead (I appreciate comparisons with that game are moot as it's very different), or is it really the situation that you can go through an area 3 times and face identical hordes?

Enemies level with the highest-ranking player, so newcomers joining at a later point find the odds stacked against them. Thanks to weapon levelling, during our playtest one online companion was unable to wield any of the tools available to him. In order to develop his stats to a basic stick-waving standard, we had to sniff out lone zombies, disarm them (literally) and let the newbie sheepishly kick them to death. 

This sounded totally game-breaking; that weapons level up to the extent that a new player can't even pick them up?  Borderlands does that but instantly gets around it by running enemies at the level of the host player, not the highest-ranked player in the game, meaning you can pick your host to adjust your challenge.  Extra players just ups the difficulty a bit.

So does this still happen?  If I buy it next week and play co-op with some of you, will you have to actually dismember zombies so I can deliver the final kill to slowly build XP until I can swing a machete?  How do they explain that a melee weapon can be too over-levelled for a new character anyway, what about the machete makes it impossible to use until I've kicked a few zombies to death? Again, Borderlands explains that well with the weapons being too complex, heavy, or tricky to use until you've honed your marksmanship a bit; but these aren't Borderlands' wild ridiculous guns, they're just regular real-world weapons.

Lazy asset recycling, ugly character models (every female has porn-star proportions and the bikini to prove it), loose driving and inconsistent world logic (some doors breakable, some not) 

The inconsistent world logic seems annoying; I remember someone clarifying that it was a case of a room with 2 doors, both identical, one you could break through but not the other.  Left 4 Dead, despite what some people thought, didn't have that inconsistency; if the door had wooden bars on it, you could break them then open it.  If the door couldn't be opened, then it was locked; there was never the option to try and break down a locked door, because you don't really want to faff with that when being chased by hordes of zombies.

So that's consistent; locked doors CANNOT be opened, ANY unlocked door CAN be opened.  In Dead Island, it seemed to be the case that door 1 CAN be smashed with a crowbar, door 2 CANNOT, despite them being totally identical.  Edge weren't complaining that you "can't open every single door," they were complaining that there's absolutely no way to tell which doors you can interact with and which you can't, and no logic explaining why there's even some you can't when they're identical to those you can.

I'll see about borrowing a copy (in fact Pablo, I'll take yours for £12 if it's still going?) if these things have been fixed, but the game certainly sounds like a [3] to me.  And bearing in mind my time zone, I'll likely be playing it SP a lot and be frustrated by these things.  I know co-op can mask a lot of ills, but I don't understand how the game can have such fundamental faults as those and not be a bit shit.

Of course, I loved Tenchu Z and Alpha Protocol, so all this is caveated with the understanding that a crap game can still be fun, but it depends what makes it crap.  It sounds to me like the stuff that makes Dead Island crap are more important than the things that make Tenchu crap.

Yeah, personal taste obviously comes into it more than anything; I adored adored adored Borderlands so maybe that doesn't bode well!  I'm not fanboying it up to support the Edge review, it's just that I've found through experience that things that tend to rankle Edge reviewers also annoy me, and the points they mentioned would really irritate me.

I don't mind items reappearing, but the narrative missing it would annoy me; "OMG HARD SUPPLY RUN!"  "But what about all these tinned goods?"  "THEY WON'T DO WE NEED SPECIFIC ONES FROM A HARD TO REACH AREA."

Likewise, you can respawn your enemies (note my constant, unerring support of Far Cry 2's sensible, explicable respawning checkpoints), but not identical enemies in identical places; I think literally killing zombie 1 on the left, then zombie 2 on the right etc every time I visit an area would annoy me too.

What you need to remember is this game has been developed by Techland, a small Polish dev rather than your Valves or Cryteks. A massive benefit of doubt needs to be given for a game that aspires to reach further than L4D in its RPG nature. There are inconsistencies but in the grand scheme of the game you overlook them as you would in every game.

Play this game with the Edge review laid open and you are only going to set yourself up for disappointment. The melee/kick issue I have not seen so would suggest is fixed. We have yet to find out if joining a lower level player's game makes the experience unbalanced but we should find out tonight as Sparky is behind Frantic and I. Zombies do respawn, as they do in Borderlands, Far Cry 2, they can also be run past especially the lumbering thug zeds.

The game is £12-15, take a chance and you might be pleasantly surprised, but leave that Edge review next to the loo.

What's the bloody fascination of having guns in zombie games? It fucking sucks. Worst thing about this game so far.

I can't get through the tutorial. It says run to the end of the corridor but I get frigging eaten every time.

Maybe you should shut your trap.

Lolkowsucks

Behind you

Kow wrote:

I can't get through the tutorial. It says run to the end of the corridor but I get frigging eaten every time.

This may sound stupid but you are turning around and running away from the zombies, right? I instictivly ran forward when he said run but realised I was running the wrong way, turned and just got safe.

i will shut my trap cause the zombies get you before you can get anywhere near my trap, waste of openingness

Subbax wrote:

FranticPea wrote:

I've only shot a gun once or twice, mainly for the novelty because I'd rarely seen one until the city. I wouldn't say it's a fascination.

It's like they suddenly become ridiculously common in the event of zombie outbreak. Also, people shoot me and although I can close the gap, taking a bit of damage and then kill the fucker. I can't do it 10 times to kill the other shits.

Yeh. They're less common in this than other zombie games though. 

Only just encountering the thugs with guns. So far molotovs have dealt with them, or charging at them in  fury mode.

Thugs with guns? [3]

The door was behind me. Turns out it was one of those magic doors that opens by itself at a key moment. Bullshit.

Pushing him or walking with him? I'm a broken man but I'll still be on for Zombie slicing.