So I broke down and made the mistake of picking this up in lieu of having nothing better to play until the end of this month. Dead Island is basically Borderlands with zombies. They both have design flaws, both are just average FPSRPGs, and both have cars. The more I think about every aspect of the game, the more it compares to Borderlands. In fact, I can't help but think that somewhere in development they just began to copy Borderlands.
That said, the game is tons of fun with a friend BUT if you were to have four people running around then the game quickly loses any challenge. For a zombie game, you're constantly pitted against ones to twos of zombies at a time. There's seriously no challenge here, especially when dying means losing a couple hundred bucks and that's it. By the time a friend and I had finished playing the other night, caution was thrown to the wind and we'd just run head first into whatever was in the way. It doesn't help that there's been zero boss fights and ZERO epic loot at all. We're halfway through the game now and we've seen like one purple drop and it was replaced by a green one level higher than it. The game really fails on every level of RPG aspect, right down to the skill trees.
Simply put, Dead Island is an awful game. But even awful, campy games are made great with a friend when all you want to do is slash limbs off zombies. I won't be playing this game a second time, just like Borderlands failed to impress and I get the feeling that unless you're playing right now, you probably won't find many people to play with once the real MP games start coming out.