Deep Silver has announced this game which is a

whole new survival-mystery game with a fresh perspective on the Dead Island universe.Escape represents a crucial bridge between the events of Dead Island and Dead Island 2, and will finally reveal the origins of the virus, and even some tantalising clues as to where the events are going to lead... but it's going to be up to you to decide what to believe.

You play as Cliff Caylow who has decided to document everything that is happening:

Cliff struggles with his own sanity as the world around him begins to become increasingly unpredictable. Time distorts and folds in on itself; strange messages appear and impossible events shatter reality. Oceans turn to blood, containers plummet from the clear sky...If Cliff had any thoughts about this being a routine documentary, he'd be ‘dead' wrong.

edit:

Joystig has more to say about the game - here's a snip about the exploration:

Exploration is gated by your steady acquisition of tools and abilities, some of which can smash through obstacles and the occasional zombie skull. As Caylow pursues the origin of the zombie outbreak, snapping some pictures along the way, he walks through a gauntlet of the surreal. He'll die beneath a sudden cloudburst of cargo containers, for example, only to wake back where he started, and as the only person with a memory of what transpired.

Escape Dead Island will be out for pc, Xbox360, PS3 this autumn.

So does anyone remeber the original teaser trailer for Dead Island. Well it seems Machinima has created a live action version. Warnings do apply though if your underage and squeamish.

You've seen the original reverse Dead Island trailer. Now watch it in live action in this incredible shot for shot remake.

Via Gamebanshee comes a press release from Deep Silver announcing that Dead Island has sold (as in sold through) more than 5 million copies. A snip from the press release:

Deep Silver today announced they have achieved a major milestone in worldwide sales for the zombie action game Dead Island. Since its release in September of 2011, Dead Island has sold-through over five million copies worldwide and still maintains an exceptional strong sales rate in all channels. This achievement includes sales from both retail and digital versions.

Destructoid has an editorial for this game entitled "From lame of the year to game of the year" where they look at how Teckland can improve the sequel, Riptide.

A quote on how the map could be improved:

The map could also use some serious work. It was difficult to find specific areas without having a mission actively guiding you to them, while waypoints were too infrequent. Efficient travel between districts would make the collecting aspects of the game a bit easier to pull off, a bonus to those who enjoyed tracking down all the weapon mods (arguably one of the game's best features). Even just labeling each district would be a massive improvement. If Riptide is to improve on Dead Island as a whole, the map and menu are a good place to start.

VG247 has news of a full Dead Island sequel titled Dead Island: Riptide, though nothing was revealed other than more information will be released over Summer.

A lengthy interview for this game can be found at Vox Games.  It deals with the way they handled itemizatio,  the goals the team set for itself, the challenges the team faced during development (also revealing some scrapped narrative ideas in the process),  the chances of seeing a sequel to the title and more. Here's an excerpt about the goals:

"We set several goals for ourselves at the beginning of the production that became the main challenges for the Level Design department," says Pawlaczyk.

The goals, he shared with Vox Games, were as follows:

Dead Island:

will feature open locations that the player will be free to explore

will feature maps that are not generic or repetitive

will astonish with its visuals, number of models and details not repel with a "flat and angular grayness"

will maintain the atmosphere of danger while featuring an open-game mechanics and a resort island environments

will be as fun to play for a single player as it will be for a four-player coop party

The last item on the list proved to be the one of the most complicated to address. Pawlaczyk says the Techland team wanted the game to be just as fun for one player as for four, which involved careful management of weapons, enemies, objects and even story. Another thing that doesn’t make sense: being afraid of a beachPart of the problem was the zombies themselves. Not only were they, in Pawlaczyk’s words "unruly," with behavior and performance difficult to predict from a level design perspective, but a zombie encounter that may be challenging for a single player could be too easy – or worse, boring – for a co-op party. One solution was to carefully manage the number and types of zombies on the map. Another was to give a co-op party ways to play that differentiated their experience from that of the single players’.

A review for this DLC can be found at Now Gamer.  The score is 6.1/10 and here's a quote:

Unlike the main campaign, Ryder White also simplifies things to a single objective. Taking away player choice and focusing their efforts down to what is now, quite obviously, a corridor, also works against the game’s fantastic open environment. Here, it’s just the combat that will keep you interested. There’s only one new character, Ryder himself. Unlike the main quest there is no co-op; this is designed to be a single-player experience.

A couple of reviews for this DLC has been penned, first by Eurogamer 2/10 and then by
Official Xbox Magazine 5/10

A sample from the Eurogamer review.

But at least there are the RPG elements, right? Levelling up the characters, filling out their skill trees, moulding your preferred zombie-mangling warrior - this was what gave the game's insipid fetch-quests some meaning. By providing a through-line from start to end, the meta-game of self-improvement rescued what could have been a ropey FPS and made it something interesting, if not polished.

Inevitably, all of that has gone. Ryder White is a character with a fixed player level and no skill tree. The crafting system remains, with a handful of mediocre jerry-rigged weapons to build, but since nothing from this DLC carries over into the main game, there's no incentive to seek them out.

And a sample from the OXM review.

Unfortunately, as a shooter, Ryder White is a sluggish and unwieldy experience. Aiming and shooting in general proves to be horribly unresponsive once you engage Dead Island’s living enemies: exchanging fire with other humans is alarmingly inaccurate in that you’re mostly just firing in their general direction and hoping to hit something, rather than using cover and precision to strategically take them out. Even more disappointing, the new campaign is also plagued with some glitches, such as one where you occasionally can’t pick up new guns even if you have empty slots in your inventory.

Game Informer talked to Sebastian Reichert, a Deep Silver producer. The interview, named Adterwords, discusses the decision to go primarily with melee combat, the game's ending boss,  the changes made from the original game's concept,  and more.  A sample:

What was it like developing a zombie game amid the sea of games with the undead? Did you ever lose hope that it would be buried by games with a similar premise?

At first it was a big concern. How do we set this game up to be not just another zombie game? But with this unique clash of the resort island and the ultimate terror we felt really good about the setting. When we added the RPG elements, the weapon modification and the close combat focus it was clear that the game has become a really new and fresh experience.

Tell me about what it was like for the team in the weeks leading up to release, anticipating how the reviews would pan out, and finally what it was like when the game became a hit and couldn’t stay on shelves.

After all the positive feedback that we had received through the press before the release, hopes were high of course. Then the reviews came, and the feedback was so unbelievably mixed. We heard basically everything about our game, from top to flop. When we heard how well Dead Island sold, we celebrated instantly.

A new DLC has been announced for Dead Island:

“Ryder White” DLC for Dead Island^TM Revealed

DLC will be released in February 2012

16th January 2012 - Hampshire, UK/... Deep Silver today announced the upcoming release of a brand new story DLC for the award-winning game Dead Island.

This DLC offers a unique new perspective into the incidents in the main story of Dead Island: This time the player will get the chance to play as Ryder White, the antagonist of the main game; learn more about his motivations and why, from his point of view, he did what he had to do. This fresh take on the Dead Island story shows Ryder White both as a military man and a loving husband.

The DLC stars Ryder White as a newly playable character and offers a single player campaign with several hours of story content with twists and turns that will shed new light on the game’s happenings. Two blueprints and weapons will further expand the already impressive arsenal of Dead Island.

The DLC will be available on February 01, 2012 for the PlayStation®3 computer entertainment system, the Xbox 360® video game and entertainment system from Microsoft and Windows PC. It will be available for 800 Microsoft points on Xbox LIVE Marketplace or for £7.99 on PSN and Steam.

Pop Matters has written an editorial on Dead Island. It goes into the mechanics, narrative and themes. Here is a snippet:

The context is where the explicit violence comes in. Zombies are brutal, unrelenting enemies, and the only way to deal with them is to be brutal and unrelenting in return. Cutting off their limbs is gory but this gore isn’t exploitative because it has a tactical purpose. We’re disarming them (pun intended), taking away their weapons. We commit acts of extreme violence because it’s the best way to survive in this world. In this way, Dead Island weds horror and survival in a way that most games don’t consider, as two things intrinsically linked. To survive in the resort, we commit the very acts of horror that leave those disturbing blood trails across the world. There’s a cyclical nature to it, allowing us to be horrified by our own violent acts of survival. But if that’s what it takes, “so be it”, says Dead Island.

 

The game is at its best when it strikes a perfect and precarious balance between violence and support, offering up zombies and health packs in equal measure. It fails when some aspect goes out of balance, like in the city of Moresby, in which there are far more zombies than health items. Here, it can feel like the game is ganging up on you and your death is unfair. Thankfully, Moresby is the outlier in Dead Island. In the rest of the game, death feels fair, as long as you’re willing to abandon friends for your own survival that is. Despite its co-op mode, Dead Island pits you, and only you, against the world. Now that’s survival-horror at its finest.

IndustryGamers has news from Deep Silver that Dead Island has shipped 1M units in NA in the first week and "will have sold 2 million units globally to retailers by the end of this week":

Dead Island has seen mixed, but mostly favorable reviews since its release on September 6, and the game is clearly getting noticed as publisher Deep Silver today announced that it's shipped over 1 million units of Techland's zombie invasion title in North America in the first week alone.

Deep Silver also noted that Dead Island "has held the #1 chart position in many global markets including the UK and France as well as on Steam, and will have sold 2 million units globally to retailers by the end of this week."

In other Dead Island news, Kotaku reports DLC has been delayed while they work on "fixes and updates":

"Right now the Dead Island development team's priority is working on fixes and updates across all platforms so that we can take care of all of the fans who have been so supportive of our game," a spokesperson said "There is some awesome DLC content planned for Dead Island, but first we have to put all our focus on the base game experience."

Lastly, Eurogamer has one of their "Face Off" console comparisons from Digital Foundry - basically both suffer compared to PC but the PS3 offers better visuals but more tearing, so the X360 is "most consistent".

Remember that haunting Dead Island trailer from months back? GameFront writes about the lost opportunity with Dead Island not actually being the game from the trailer:

I’ve had numerous discussions with people about Dead Island, in real life, on Twitter and in the comments on my mixed review of the game. Some people love it. Some find it a waste of money. But I think we can all agree that whatever it was that captured our imaginations in that trailer is not what Dead Island is. Long ago, Techland even admitted that the family from the trailer didn’t appear in the game, although the parents have a weak, nonsensical cameo in the final game (you can find them dead, almost holding hands as if they froze to death together on the Titanic, in their hotel room right at the beginning).

But the disparity between the Dead Island trailer and the story it told, and the game as shipped, highlights a colossal missed opportunity as well as, in my mind, a voracious appetite among gamers that simply is not being sated. The Dead Island trailer wasn’t even presenting us with gameplay — only with the promise of a harrowing experience and a (zombie) horror story that wouldn’t pull any punches and didn’t go for camp.

The Steam forums has a comprehensive list of community mods and fixes for Dead Island, ranging from gameplay mods to changing the weather to simple fixes for FOV and enabling vsync. I haven't used any of these but it certainly seems worth a look.

There's quite a bit of Dead Island news about, not least is the admission that the wrong version was uploaded to Steam - it seems the current NA release is actually a dev build (for example, noclip is bound to the 'y' key). From Gamasutra:

Deep Silver has acknowledged that it accidentally released an "incorrect version" of apocalyptic zombie shooter Dead Island on the North American Steam service, pledging to patch the title as quickly as possible.

Early players and reviewers have reported widespread technical problems with the title, including game freezes and crashes, graphical issues, and odd in-game behavior such as the ability to walk through walls.

"We deeply regret that an incorrect version of Dead Island was inadvertently made available to players on Steam launch in North America," Deep Silver spokesperson Aubrey Norris told Gamasutra.

Apparently the correct version will be loaded up "asap" and the international launch on Friday will be correct. Separate to this is a release-day patch with 37 fixes (presumably meant to apply to the "correct" version).

Moving on, here are some reviews courtesy of Blue's.

GameSpot's score is 7/10 and here's an early excerpt:

Much like its once-idyllic location, Dead Island isn't as it first appears. It's got zombies in it, but it's not a survival horror game. It's played in a first-person perspective and has shooting, but it's not a first-person shooter. And whatever that slow-motion trailer would have you believe, it's not a stirring emotional experience. Dead Island is a schlocky, open-world action role-playing game that favours grisly melee combat above all things.

Dead Island's expansive sandbox setting spreads inland, beyond the Royal Palms Resort into city and jungle environments. Its RPG nature is clear in the prominence of quests, doled out by harrowed survivors in the makeshift shelters that form quest hubs. Similarly prominent are RPG staples such as talent trees and numbers, always the numbers: levels, weapon stats, damage, and experience point scores popping out of enemies as you hack away. There are also satisfyingly vicious weapons to be improvised, upgraded, and creatively modded, and a robust online system supports the four-player co-op in which the game is best enjoyed.

• GameTrailers video review
• Hooked Gamers - 8.8/10

Moving on, IGN asks Is It Fallout or Borderlands?, although they just talk about the game in general:

Stephanie Lee: Yeah, the graphics are different, but Dead Island has a way of creating that sort of deceptively idyllic atmosphere and then drops a bunch of rabid zombies on your ass, making you fight for your life.

And, as I said, it's way more Borderlands than Fallout. Borderlands was a game about looting, and Dead Island feels similar. Lots and lots of looting normal items, and, of course, super-awesome weapons. And like Borderlands (and the games that inspired it), the weapons are color-coded based on rarity of the item. And THEN, you have the added depth of weapons durability, upgrading, and crafting a la Dead Rising.

Greg Miller: WHATEVER. Fallout was all about looting. I looted so many boxes. So much cola.

Here are three more Dead Island reviews. The scores seem to have settled a little but "fun" is still a common term.

Jim Sterling at Destructoid, with 7/10:

In stark contrast to the game's marketing, Dead Island isn't much for exposition. Although there's a somewhat basic story, punctuated with occasional cutscenes, the vast majority of time revolves around a single motivation -- you're trapped on a resort island full of zombies, and you have to kill them all, while completing inane quests and looking for a way off the rock. Every now and then, Dead Island will try to tug at the heartstrings with an "emotional" moment, but the characters are so one-dimensional and the dialog so forced that these serious sequences are laughable at best. Those looking for a decent story will have to go elsewhere because Dead Island's writers make only the most token of efforts. 

What we're left with is a game that is, essentially, Borderlands with zombies. The class-based leveling system, implementation of upgrades, mission structure and level exploration are ripped wholesale from Gearbox's critically acclaimed game. It's a strange experience that attempts to blend realism and roleplaying together. On the one hand, your characters have low defense and are forced to fight with weapons that easily break. On the other, you're ransacking treasure chests for loot and creating axes wreathed in flame or rifles that shoot toxic bullets. 

• CVG - 6.5/10
• GamesTM - 7/10

We recently ran a Dead Island newsbit after a reader sent it in but we didn't add it to the database. Now that early reviews are in and they all call the game an action/RPG, it's time to cover it. In fact, most of these articles call it "Fallout 3 with zombies", so while I wouldn't expect RPG nirvana, it might be worth a look if you'd like an action zombie game with decent RPG flavourings. Each review points out rough edges but the overall vibe is positive.

From IGN, who scored 8/10:

Dead Island is Fallout 3 with zombies. Plenty of people are going to compare it to Dead Rising (as you can create weapons) and Left 4 Dead (as the action is first-person and good for four players online), but when I finally got past the game's obtuse opening and less than stellar cutscenes, I found a world rife with quests, interesting environments, and a character progression system that had me begging for more hours in the day. In short, Dead Island's a rough around the edges role-playing game, and I dug it.

They also have a video review here (thanks Melvil).

Eurogamer is only 6/10 but there is still light at the end of the tunnel:

Now that we've established that Dead Island is a ramshackle B-movie rather than a streamlined blockbuster, let's clear up another misconception. This is not just a horror action game with occasional RPG bits glued on. It's a full-on openworld horror role-playing game, complete with crafting, side quests and skill trees. In fact, I'll put money on the fact that the conversation at developer Techland's Warsaw HQ started with the question, "What would happen if Fallout 3 and Left 4 Dead went on a holiday to the Far Cry island?" That, in a blood-stained disembowelled nutshell, is Dead Island.

TeamXbox, with 9/10:

The comparison has been made many times before, and will continue to be made as well, but it works because it fits. Dead Island is Fallout 3 with Zombies. Dead Island is not Left4Dead, nor is it Dead Rising. If you are expecting the experience of either of those two games while playing Dead Island, you will be setting yourself up for disappointment, and will only have yourself to blame. This is an action-RPG with zombies in it. There is a surprising amount of depth to the character customization and even to the abilities of the different characters. More on that later though; let’s get into a discussion of what went right, what went wrong, and everything in between.

X360 Achievements, with 84%:

Dead Island is a huge game and assuming you take the time to complete all of the side missions you will be looking at 30-40 hours to get everything done, even in a team. Such a grand undertaking might be a touch too repetitive for solo play, but this game was designed for co-op and thankfully thrives on it. The story may be hokum, but the experience of being trapped on an island with only the bare minimum in terms of supplies is one that sells itself. You will probably spend as much time hightailing it away from zombies as you do fighting them, but even a great escape can be an adrenaline-pounding thing of beauty. The only issues really are the graphics and mission-related glitches, which are more intrusive than they should be and hold the game back from true greatness. So, pick up a posse, immerse yourself in Banoi and don’t forget the sunscreen... Although perhaps a machete would be a better option.

Thanks to VG247 for some of these.