I don’t normally whine like a bitch over a game, even when an achievement takes quite literally more than 7 solid days to complete (*cough* Untouchables – Left 4 Dead / Vincible – Borderlands *cough*), however with Dead Island I am reserving the right to rant and bitch like a hippie on Vietnam.

As I mentioned, 99.9% of the time if you’re pissed off at a game it’s your fault for not being good enough, yes there are always arguments with a lot of games that difficulty curves are so stupidly high that it makes the game near impossible, but I have a different gripe here; a gripe that I can’t remember having brought up since N64 poor programming days. What I’m talking about is the game Dead Island. It didn’t look like the game of the year from the reviews and screens I’d seen, but it looked decent enough, and for the first 20 odd hours of gameplay it was.

As a zombie RPG it’s a good bit of entertainment, I can’t argue with that, it’s pretty hard, but then surviving a zombie apocalypse would be. It’s far from a perfect game, but luckily for me I haven’t come across the multitude of bugs that a lot of other people have come across, and I count myself lucky for that. However, after 18 and a half hours of grinding, collecting weapons and items, developing my characters skills, and pushing on the story missions the game suddenly froze. Fine, that happens to the Xbox all the time, it’s a shit console and I accept this as the way it works. However, rebooting and loading up my latest save causes the whole console to crash again. And again. And again.

This is plain unacceptable for a post beta release. I’ve been doing a bit of research and this issue seems more prevalent on the PS3 than the Xbox 360, but I can assure you it does happen on the Xbox. So now I’ve lost nigh on 19 hours of gameplay, I was 80% through the game but now it looks like I have to start again from the ground up but, to be quite honest, the game isn’t good enough to make me want to. Oh but the developers at Techland have come up with a cunning plan:

“If you load up a new game with the same character you were playing with previously, you can start from the same chapter at the same level you were previously at.”

Great, that sounds reasonable, I mean I’ll lose about 20 minutes of gameplay, but that’s fine by me. So I start again at the beginning of the chapter I was on only to find that all my collectibles have reset to 0, all my weapons have disappeared, all my weapon mods have disappeared, all my stored weapons have disappeared, all my items have disappeared… you getting the picture? So yes; all my handguns, rifles and shotguns I’ve spent 18 hours scavenging for; all my machetes that deal 600 damage, all my upgrades have gone, and I’m left with two batons that do about 12 damage each… facing level 29 zombies… ummm am I missing something here? So I thought that was a bit of a slap in the face, but the geniuses as Techland had come up with an even more cunning plan to stop this happening in the first place:

“Every time you save the game, attach a flash drive to one of the Xbox USB ports, and copy the same game file to the flash drive. This way, when the save corrupts, you can load your last uncorrupted save from the flash drive.”

Really? Did I read that right? Words escape me…

Honestly, words still escape me so I’ll move onto the next point. Well, a closely related point of the fact that how the hell did this get past beta testing? Seeing the number of people this has effected I would be hugely surprised if this didn’t pop up during a testing session. Several times. So reading the trades description act a product has to be, and I quote, “fit for purpose” meaning that the product has to do what it is supposed to do. In the case of a lawn mower, it must be able to cut grass, in the case of a printer, it must be able to print onto paper. You get where I’m going with this? So I think with such a blatant error in the game anyone who has had this issue is perfectly within their rights to ask for a full refund. You’d be quite pissed off if you bought a movie and it only had 80% of the film on the DVD? Well how is this case any different?