Isle of the Dead

Isle of the Dead is a 1993 video game developed by Rainmaker Software and published by Merit Software.

Plot
You're a passenger on a South Pacific island-hopping adventure. But your last stop is an abrupt one. Crashing on the beach of a jungle island, you are the sole survivor lost in paradise... or is it?

You must hunt for survival items, weapons, and a way to get off the island. Be prepared to do a log of blasting, hacking and slashing... or die! Hideous zombies, vicious wolves, and other horrors await you if you dare!

Gameplay
Isle of the Dead is a first-person shooter and point-and-click adventure game where the player is the lone survivor of a plane wreck on a mysterious tropical island, teeming with flesh-eating zombies under the control of an evil mad scientist. After retrieving items from the wreckage, the player can explore the beach and move further inland by hacking at the undergrowth with a machete.

Why It Sucks

 * 1) The FPS portion is a clear ripoff of Wolfenstein 3D. The box even uses this as a selling point with a quoted review.
 * 2) Unfair difficulty.
 * 3) Your character shoots himself if you quit the game.
 * 4) The game will crash. A lot.
 * 5) Stupidly awful and nearly non-existent story.
 * 6) The game gives no instructions or directions of any kind. This leads to aimlessly wandering around trying to figure out what to do. Adding insult to the injury, the maps are designed like mazes with jungle maps being the worst ones, since there are "walls" you can go through using the machete, which makes it confusing even more.
 * 7) The graphics, textures, and design are rather pretty poor. What makes it even worse is that all characters during the FPS portion of gameplay are much bigger than maps themselves (even zombified children are over-sized due to their sprites) and have badly proportioned bodies, and maps are not only horribly designed but are also pretty confusing (see point 6).
 * 8) An awful sense of humor.
 * 9) The game tries to mix cartoon themes and humor with horror and violence, but as a result, it looks extremely ridiculous and stupid.
 * 10) One of the enemies is a zombified child who mistakes you for his dad. While it's actually not a bad thing, the way it is realized in the game (see point 10) shows a pretty bad taste.
 * 11) The map does not help at all. It only shows the area you are currently in along with the enemies that have been killed. Trying to draw a map yourself doesn't help a lot.
 * 12) There are various traps that will instantly kill the player, but they are extremely difficult to see.
 * 13) Misleading box art. The protagonist is not a muscular guy, but rather a very average looking guy.
 * 14) The default movement speed is extremely fast (this can be adjusted in the options menu).
 * 15) Very poor music composed by Scott "The Skinny Man" Loehr.
 * 16) You can find a rifle, but if you use it without oiling it first (which the game never tells you about) you will instantly die.
 * 17) The machete is replaced with a bamboo stick in the 1994 version.
 * 18) The so-called "voice acting" sucks.
 * 19) You walk in on a naked girl in the uncensored version, which is just a pointless sexualization for the sake of it.
 * 20) When you re-enter an area, every enemy respawns.
 * 21) You have to see and hear the cackling scientist every time you die. This includes when quitting the game.
 * 22) You start with no weapons but can find the starting weapon (a machete) fairly quickly. However, it is pretty useless, considering the number of enemies attacking you and that you will nearly always get damaged by getting close enough to them.
 * 23) The comic that the game comes with (added to tell the story) does nothing to help the plot, and some of the game's instructions are in the comic.
 * 24) You need to shoot the flare gun at the end of the game or you will lose.
 * 25) The manual misspells "lot" as "log".

Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) You will probably never run out of ammo.
 * 2) The game can be saved at any time.
 * 3) It is at least a challenge to get both the shotgun and the uzi.
 * 4) The in-game artwork is not bad actually, even though it's really out of place.
 * 5) The front cover of the game box is quite nicely made and very detailed.

Link to play (player discretion is advised!)
https://archive.org/details/msdos_Isle_of_the_Dead_1993

Trivia

 * Most of the people who worked on this game never worked on any other games.
 * This game was reviewed by Sandy Petersen (who worked on Doom, Doom II: Hell on Earth, and The Ultimate Doom and made music for these games).

Videos
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