1. Dead Island
Dead Island Riptide has recently come into the news for its horrific sexualisation of a mutilated torso (a model of one obviously, not a real one), but thats not why its predecessor has made it on our list of the nefarious. Dead Island (abbreviated, rather appropriately, to DI) has many issues, like how its NPCs share the same boring personality that leaves players eagerly skipping dialogue 14 minutes in, along with being forced to play as one of its insultingly unoriginal and unrelatable protagonists, so why did it make any sales at all? Why the violence of course! DI has some of the most brutal fight sequences in gaming history, giving players a vast array of weapons such as axes, machetes, baseball bats, and nail hammers, and sending them across a sprawling land to smash open skulls and chop off arms to their hearts content. No other game, to my knowledge at least, lets you break an enemys arms, watch them desperately flail at you for a few moments, and then allow you to kick them to the ground and crush their head by jumping on it. The graphics are disturbingly detailed. At one point, after seeing an enemys cranium explode, the piece of skull containing eye sockets flew up to the screen and past my characters head. It was only visible for a second, yet the realism the game was trying to instil into such a brutal act made me feel queasy, as it was in that moment I realised that the game, at its core, is little more than murder porn. Some might try to justify it by saying its an accurate representation of what a zombie apocalypse would be like, a kill or be killed dynamic that forces the main character to commit atrocious acts, yet if the developers were trying for realism wouldnt they have had some form of characterisation of well, anyone? The lead never once feels any sort of moral dilemma even after she/he kicks someone to death for the first time, and not once do you see a child in the game, so either were playing as a psychopath on the least fertile island on the planet or this is a game designed merely to help sadists get-off. And if someone spends their free time playing in a world modelled on reality, going round smashing zombies, and later ordinary people, to pieces for their own enjoyment like theyre Michael Myers on PCP, can it really be claimed theyre completely stable?
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