Dead Island: SurVivors washes up on Android without the franchise's usual bite

The Dead Island franchise of first-person action games had a rocky start, but quickly established itself on consoles and PC. Now, publisher Deep Silver has decided to visit mobile in the form of Dead Island: SurVivors.

The free-to-play title weighs in at 44MB, which is followed by a 1GB download after launching it. And truth be told, it feels like a mobile game that happens to have the Dead Island branding. Don’t expect a first-person perspective, a huge variety of melee weapons or a massive open-world environment to explore. In other words, this isn’t anything remotely close to a console port, mashing up the usual mobile genres instead.

We have basic melee combat on offer, as you tap on zombies to attack them and tap on the environment to move around, but it has stereotypical mobile trappings otherwise. That means an emphasis on base-building/tower defense, loot and RPG mechanics. Otherwise, you’ll be collecting heroes, laying down traps for the undead, and teaming up with friends.

Dead Island: SurVivors user reviews are mostly positive, but people have complained about microtransactions, long cooldown timers to unlock mediocre loot, the lack of gamepad and joystick support, and the inability to play offline. Nevertheless, it seems like tower defense fans are enjoying it, anyway.

In our brief time with the game, we did find cooldown timers to pop up fairly often. Between loot cases and upgrading your traps, the title is certainly guiding users to splash out. A console port, this is not. All in all, the game seems to lack the core elements that made the Dead Island franchise stand out. In saying so, the bar for mobile games is so low that some of you might want to give it a go nonetheless.

Keen to try out Dead Island: SurVivors? Then you can grab it via the Play Store link below.