[promo title=”Stunlock Studios’s latest MOBA doesn’t seem to be capitalising on its source material.”][/promo]
What’s the best way to take an average game with decent melee combat mechanics and a palatable co-op experience, then methodically rip out everything about it that made it worth playing? Ask Stunlock Studios. They know.
That might seem like a harsh introduction to an analysis of a game in its closed beta phase, but let’s just forget about all the things that can be changed. Forget about the on/off connectivity, the presentation, the lacklustre weapon sound effects, the lack of a decent skills list and the other tiny little finishing touches that make a game into a complete entity. This is about the concept of Dead Island: Epidemic as a free-2-play Multiplayer Online Battle Arena game.
What needs to be understood about the Dead Island games is that they have a dedicated following. Fans who enjoy combating a rage-zombie-mutant virus with insanely improvisational weapons, like a razor-embedded vibrator attached to a fishing rod with duct tape. The gamers who played Dead Island and Dead Island: Riptide liked scavenging through blood-spattered holiday resorts, fishing villages and flooded jungles for blueprints, cash and new gear. They liked being able to hack off zombie limbs and charging into a crowd of flesh-eaters with their Rage Mode at full capacity. Dead Island and Dead Island: Riptide were games built around the idea that players could scavenge and construct their chosen tools for survival. So one would assume that Dead Island: Epidemic is being developed with this kind of mentality…But it isn’t.
Stunlock Studios have decided that the world needs another free-2-play MOBA, where character progression is painfully slow and players are more or less coerced into slogging through swarms of encroaching enemies with repeated clicking. Ranged and melee attacks are combined with special moves that can do damage and inflict status ailments to enemies or offer support to teammates.
Now, what should be noted about Stunlock Studios is that they’ve already made a very successful MOBA game in the form of Bloodline Champions. A skill-based PvP affair with all the things that Dead Island: Epidemic doesn’t currently have, including play style variety and engaging combat. And the more I look at Dead Island: Epidemic the more I think that Stunlock Studios have misunderstood the source material, opting to bring in successful gameplay elements from Bloodline Champions which simply do not work – and I’ll be touching more upon that shortly.
There is a crafting system, but there isn’t a scavenging system. You cannot loot bodies, nor can you loot the admittedly nice variety of environments. And if the rewards you get for finishing a level are anything to go by I suspect that looting has been removed from the equation altogether. What you obtain on your excursions is pretty much left to chance. Depending on how quickly you finish a level, there may be higher chances of obtaining rare loot, so…Best of luck, I guess. The shop menus in the home base lead me to believe players will be given the option of purchasing specific gear outright, rather than having to wait to craft it. That, to me, demonstrates a colossal failure to understand what Dead Island should be all about.
If that doesn’t suck the fun out of a Dead Island game, then this surely will: because it’s a top-down action affair, you can no longer target specific enemy limbs or inflict deliberate critical damage with your weapons. The game modes are centred on PvE and PvP encounters, devoid of the inventive barricade-building and trap-setting of Dead Island: Riptide. There are still barricades, mind you; the kind you have to click on a hundred times to destroy in order to progress through a mission.
The blood and guts of this franchise – it’s uniqueness as a first-person melee game – is gone, replaced with a by-the-book experience you will have seen done better in a number of other PC titles.
This isn’t necessarily going to put players off, but I fail to see how it would turn them on. Looking at the recently finished SMITE, for instance, I can already find more originality and interest in the combat and character variants than I could hope to find in a Dead Island game. The source material in Dead Island is far too restrictive for a MOBA title, where there ought to be a powerful urge to discover new characters and ways of playing the game. DOTA 2 and League of Legends would have outclassed this closed beta Dead Island: Epidemic in their own closed beta stages – so, too, would Bloodline Champions. MOBA games are about variety of play style and skilled timing, neither of which appears to be at the forefront of Dead Island: Epidemic.
Its roster of virus-immune survivors is a dreary bunch of light attackers, support classes and heavy builds, none of which feel well and truly different to play. It would have been far more interesting if Stunlock Studios took a page out of the Left 4 Dead playbook and made the zombie classes playable. There certainly seems to have been more thought put into how those chaps can cause havoc.
The only way I could see Dead Island: Epidemic turning into a plausible MOBA game would be for it to lose the whole ‘free-2-play’ system. It needs to kick up player customisation by a significant few notches, too, adding more skills and more ways to obtain them. As it currently stands, Epidemic fails to engage me with its core concepts and that’s a big problem for a game to have in its beta phase – particularly when it’s exclusive to a platform where the competition is extremely fierce.
Don’t take my word for it: sign up for the closed beta (PC only) here at deadislandepidemic.com.