Welcome to our review of Radiation Island, a survival game filled with radiation, zombies, big bears and other predators.
Radiation Island is a survival adventure game where you craft your own destiny in a huge open world environment. As part of the Philadelphia Experiment, you have become stranded in a parallel, alternate reality. Discover this new and mysterious world, with all its surprises. Use everything you find to survive it and solve its puzzle to get back to the real world.
Follow your own path in an environment of breathtaking beauty and gigantic scope. Explore huge forests inhabited by dangerous wolves, bears and mountain lions. Investigate abandoned villages and old military compounds where zombies guard vital tools, weapons, and clues to the secrets of this world. You can even swim and dive if you can avoid the hungry crocodiles.
Hunt wild animals, fish or gather fruits to overcome hunger. Mine for resources and craft weapons, tools and basic vehicles. Find hidden treasures, equipment and firearms to prevail in a world full of perils: radiation, anomalies, harsh weather and enraged zombies.
Experience the full day-night cycle and face the dangers of darkness and cold. This island provides a great punch on paper and our review is to make it clear if this game lives up to its description. Set in a very big environment that at first glance is quite impressive, you have rivers, mountains, deserted villages and base camps. Along the way, you find out you can swim, fly a paraglider that is up on a hilltop, which is possibly the most awesome thing that this game offers.
Everything else is kind of not good. There are 3 difficulty settings and I originally set off on the first level. The one where enemies and radiation basically do nothing to you. I ended up playing one of the most boring survival games I ever played. I walked up to a zombie, hit it, done. I walked up to a bear, hit it, done. I was “attacked” by a horde of zombies, hit around randomly with a handheld weapon I had just crafted, done. It was all far too easy.
So I kept exploring the island, found nothing really to do aside from building a house to stay in at night and craft more items. I did find these electrical buildings, which shoot of electrical discharge bursts, but heck, at that point, I was getting tired of all the issues this game has. Despite a very appealing premise, this game is just not finished. At one point, it crashed on me twice in a row, with about 10 minutes in between. I found the enemies to be overly silly in how they attack or even walk around. In easy mode, the game provided so little challenge, I almost did not even want to bother with the harder modes.
Another example, when you kill a zombie, they keep moving on the floor, like a floating style movement instead of just being dead and motionless. This repeated itself with the animals too. The entire game just feels unpolished and even unfinished to me. It has an amazing premise and the first few minutes you play, it is all peaches but the more you play, the less fun it becomes…
In conclusion, Radiation Island is just not a good game, it feels unfinished, janky to say the least and just not a good experience. I hope the developers release a few patches at which time I will gladly jump back in and even write an addendum here, but for now, I have to give it a failing grade. The score for this game is 30%
