The story made the rounds well before its release, that Techland had been working on it between higher-profile projects for years, and that they’d spent a long time trying and repeatedly failing to find a publisher. That was okay, though, because it was an obvious labor of love by the developers.
The idea behind it was absolutely solid–an open-world action game with a lot of RPG and survival horror mixed in, where you leveled up and scavenged parts for weird, all-but-explicitly-magical weaponry while beating zombies with pipes, oars, and eventually your custom-made electric katana–but the implementation was screwed. The original Dead Island was glitchy and had some significant design flaws, particularly if you were crazy enough to try to play it alone.
