A little bit quest based RPG, a little bit undead apocalypse. Despite its foibles and technical hiccups Dead Island is a title easy to love. In fact after the first half an hour your only real questions are why nobody made a game like this before, it seems like the perfect recipe of classic RPG tropes and zombies.

While there are some notable problems with the game, the pros definitely outweigh the cons with Dead Island.

If Dead Island teaches you nothing else it's that friends with benefits (benefits being an assault rifle) are essential for zombie killing

In the south east Asian tropical paradise of Banoi, a made up island off the coast of Papau New Guinea, things have gone messy. The resort island has been gripped by a zombie plague and only four survivors seem immune to the infectious zombie bites. A rapper with a troubled past, a washed up drunk former football star, an ex cop turned bodyguard and, strangely, a timid hotel receptionist.

These are your four characters, each with individual skill trees, special abilities and preferred weapon types. When you start the game you wake up in the hotel and immediately notice things are not well, the evacuation alarm is sounding and there’s blood all over the place. After some elevator problems and almost getting killed during your first zombie run-in you’re rescued by a lifeguard who, along with several other survivors, is hiding out in a beach house. As the unzombefiable hero your job is to journey out into the wilds of Banoi Island and search for supplies, survivors and hopefully find a way off the island.

See that bloated zombie in the back, do not hit him with an axe, he's a zombie suicide bomber

Dead Island is what would happen if Fallout 3 had a drunken affair with Left 4 Dead. The game has a series of huge environments to explore, quest givers to discover and items to craft together to make new items and weapons. Then there’s the rampaging undead, intense gore, boisterous characters and four player coop. While definitely the best of both worlds it’s not as deep as either of its parents.

You would be wise to also disregard that infamous early trailer for Dead Island, you know the one with the little girl? Dead Island is not as emotionally compelling as that trailer would lead you to believe. The game is about kicking zombie ass and taking quests, then using quest rewards to kick more ass. Characters aren’t particularly endearing and the plot is a very ‘by the book’ zombie story. Despite the playable characters lengthy spoken back stories when you select them, the characters themselves don’t develop as the game progresses. The quests and game progression aren’t terrible, a few are quite brilliant, but they’re not five star through and through.

The strait jacketed Rage extra is a Ram zombie. You will learn to HATE Rams.

Dead Island makes up for this in a big way by capturing the disaster atmosphere of a zombie apocalypse. Crashed tour buses littered with corpses dot highways, buildings are on fire, windows are barricaded with suitcases and furniture. It all looks suitably eerie and devastated. The game provides plenty of unscripted scares as well. Your neck hairs will prickle when you wade into a pool stained with blood and hear a groan behind you, turning to see a zombie rise from the murk and grab you. Or turning right and left on an open road, hearing the screaming infected zombies coming for you but uncertain what bushes they’re going to leap from.

Each of the characters has a unique feel and RPG play style such as tank or support that develops as you level up their skills. The rapper Sam B for instance, is a tank character, focused on strong melee damage and drawing zombie attention (aggro to those familiar with the lingo). The three tiered skill tree system is very similar to Borderlands or Warcraft and allows you to focus experience points into a single area or spread them out across a couple of options.

The zombies come in several forms, the first you encounter range from the basic shambling undead to sprinting infected and brutish thugs. The golden rule is always aim for the head, whether you’re swinging a bat covered in nails, throwing knives or shooting, go for the brain.

Electrifying, igniting and eviscerating them all work pretty well, just kill the damn things

The Island of Banoi looks fantastic and there’s a lot to see and discover as you drive or hike around the terrain. The zombies also look the part, their bodies falling to rotting pieces as you bash at them, exposing bone and muscle underneath and limbs exploding in fountains of gore when you hack them off. The human characters by comparison have that wooden, moving wax museum look. Their movements are jerky and odd and they have a habit of staring at your crotch when talking to you. Strangely, as the game progressed the environments slowly get more restrictive and the last few missions in a prison almost feel like a corridor survival shooter game.

One of the most terrible aspects of the game are the accents, there are plenty of Australian characters in the game, but it’s pretty obvious they didn’t hire any Australian actors to portray them. The voices are gratingly awful, with plenty of stereotypical ‘crikeys’ thrown in for good measure.

This is a bad situation, maybe even 'super bad'

The games gentle difficulty in the first act spikes painfully when you reach the second act and move into the next major area. Suddenly your established badassery counts for naught as swarms of zombies have you running through the streets blindly. The average number of zombies per encounter leaps from two to six and special attack zombies are around every corner. Suddenly the whole first act feels like a single player tutorial and the rest of the game cries out for coop. With a friend, or best of all a complete team, the game is very manageable, but alone it can get pretty damn frustrating. You will likely die often if you don't play conservatively and spend a lot of time just running around building up weapons and turning in repeatable quests for level boosts.

Adding to the woes, the worst technical issues come down to the coop. What should have been the best element of the game turns out to be huge head ache, especially for Playstation 3 users. Finding games is difficult but maintaining them is even harder, the connection drops frequently and you’re regularly booted of the network, even when just playing local. PSN System updates also have a nasty habit of deleting large amounts of player progress or deleting character progress all together. Trophy data can also be lost. Compared to similar open world games with drop in coop like Fable and Crackdown the over complicated process of Dead Island and the technical issues are a nightmare.

In addition to deadly zombies there's the greater threat of your coop partners running you over

While Dead Island has had a more troubled release than any other game this year it doesn’t detract from the fact it’s a cracking title. Another month’s development wouldn’t have gone astray to clean up the graphics and sort out the network bugs, and clearly the developers wanted to get the game out before the summer’s big releases. Dead Island can still stand on it’s own as a terrific RPG and an excellent zombie game, squeezing into my zombie game leaderboard in second place between Dead Rising and Left 4 Dead 2. Chopping of zombie heads with an electrified machete just never gets old.