10 AWESOME Video Game Trailers (Then The Game Sucked)

3. Dead Island

aliens colonial marines
Deep Silver

The Trailer

The trailer for Dead Island is one of the best cinematic trailers for a game out there. The trailer focuses on a family on vacation on the island of Banoi, where the zombie outbreak is about to begin.

The rest of the trailer is just the family struggling to stay alive, the viewer quickly becoming invested in this young family as they try to avoid an entire island that wants them dead. Definitely a great setup for a harrowing survival horror game, but how did the game itself follow it up?

The Game

The answer, according to Deep Silver apparently, was to nix the entire concept the trailer set up, including all the characters established in the trailer, in favor of a more generic band of highly trained badasses.

Talk about blowing a good thing. The game itself is fine, if a bit rote, but the characters are just not that interesting and you don't care about them nearly as much as the family shown in the trailer.

Not the most dishonest trailer out there, but still a letdown.

Contributor
Contributor

John Tibbetts is a novelist in theory, a Whatculture contributor in practice, and a nerd all around who loves talking about movies, TV, anime, and video games more than he loves breathing. Which might be a problem in the long term, but eh, who can think that far ahead?