What do you look for in your zombie games? A fast-paced, white-knuckle slayathon, à la Left 4 Dead? A more leisurely, story-based adventure like Dead Rising? Good news, thrill-seekers: Dead Island does a great job of catering to both camps.

Part action game, part RPG, Dead Island casts you as one of four people visiting a tropica lisland resort that's struck by — what else? — the dreaded Zombie Apocalypse. The outbreak hits its peak in the middle of the night, sometime after your character's blacked out from an ill-advised mix of booze and pills (shown in a hazy opening cutscene). The next morning, you find yourself wandering the halls of your seemingly deserted hotel...and before long, fleeing from an undead attacker.

Once you help fellow survivors establish a safehouse at a resort garage, you start to get a taste of everything the open-world setting has to offer. The group's leader sends you on missions to collect supplies and find a radio receiver — errands that eventually take you to other safehouses at a church, in the island's wealthy district, and so on. Conversations with assembled NPCs range from hokey to heartfelt, with people mourning their dead relatives, making survival plans, or muttering hopelessly to themselves.

These chats generate dozens of sidequests, too, involving everything from rescuing trapped survivors to searching chopper wreckage to scrawling a giant "HELP" message on a nearby beach. Like the main-story missions, they vary widely in difficulty and appeal: we got tired of fetching gas, food, and other materials after a while, but some multi-stage scenarios — like stealing an armored truck from a hotel and repairing local water pumps (a post-apocalyptic staple that's grueling here) — felt much more epic.

Even when you're not retrieving a vehicle, expect to do lots of driving, as many missions take you to gas stations, beach homes, and other locations where using the fast-travel option (which warps you between safehouses) doesn't make sense. Vehicles handle a bit rough — as in, Grand Theft Auto III rough — but plowing them into road-wandering zombies (for XP!) and other obstacles does mainly cosmetic damage, so it didn't bother us much.

And in terms of core gameplay, you'll be doing a lot more fighting, anyways. Each of the main characters has a different weapons specialty: receptionist Xian likes knives, rapper Sam B prefers blunt instruments, former NFL star Logan excels at thrown weapons, and ex–police officer Purna is a firearms expert. No matter who you play as, you can wield everything from machetes to rifles to Molotovs; you'll just be better with the weapons that your character prefers. When standard arms aren't enough, you can also craft unique weapons using the many random items you pick up throughout the game. Who knew deodorant is a key bomb ingredient, or that coriander could be part of a zombie-felling toxin?

Upgrading weapons and crafting new ones makes for okay — even enjoyable — micromanagement, but the flip side is slavish weapons repair. Every weapon degrades with use, and some implements (even heavy wrenches) degrade so fast, you have to fix them after just a couple of big battles. Sure, your inventory holds 12 weapons and repair tables are fairly common, but making breakable weapons a selectable option would definitely improve this game.

One feature we love, on the other hand, is co-op for up to four players. Whether you're divide-and-conquering mission objectives or ganging up on tank-like Thug zombies, it's a blast sharing Dead Island's open world with your buddies. Multiplayer fights are extra-insane, as the number of undead scales up with additional players, and watching several people kick a Walker to death is bizarrely amusing. Better yet, having comrades opens up possibilities for emergent gameplay (like racing each other in four cars as opposed to everyone sharing a vehicle), and it emphasizes the fact that you can play the game straight or ignore the missions altogether, just messing around in a ghoul-infested zone.

Much of the game, in fact, seems built to promote wanton fun, even with its weapons micromanagement and massive character-specific skill trees. Instead of reloading after you die, you usually just respawn a few seconds later in a nearby area, minus a small money penalty. The game's also surprisingly scary at times: in dark spaces, we found ourselves flinching at disembodied moans, and being rushed by Infested (fast, growling zombies reminiscent of 28 Days Later) freaked us out more than once. Dead Island isn't the best vacation ever, but it does offer lots of entertaining activities.

On Xbox 360

+ Open-world zombie slaying with a formula (action-RPG) that works.

+ Four-player co-op makes for terrific combat and horseplay.

– Consistently fun but rarely amazing; weapon decay grows annoying; too many fetch quests.

? What’s with the vomiting Floater zombie? He looks like an old geezer who ate too much.

8.0