It’s been quite a while since a trailer made me say, “Wow.” And indeed since one made me gasp, “Oh my God.” This CGI teaser for Dead Island – a zombie game originally announced in 2007 – is both stunning and horrendous. Bleak like your puppy dying of tiredness is bleak. The game itself sounds absolutely fascinating. An open-ended sandbox zombie survival game, first-person but with an emphasis on melee combat, where you must try to survive for as long as possible on an infested New Guinea island. We have little more to go on, other than the knowledge that Deep Silver are publishing, and that the people behind it are capable of a trailer as brilliantly morose as the one below.

There’s also word of it containing those infamous“RPG elements”, and oddly for a supposedly open-ended sandbox game, a focus on story. The melee is said to let you pick up almost any object you find, Dead Rising-style. And according to IGN who bring us all this info and lots more, because it’s set on a tourist tropical island, the place isn’t littered with high grade weaponry and ammo caches. Instead it’s about foraging and improvising with what you can find.

There’s to be drop-in four-player co-op should you wish to work together, or it works perfectly well in single player mode for lone survivors. And according to IGN, it’s “disgusting”. They’ve got a ton of screenshots and artwork over there.

It’s set for a 2011 release, but nothing more specific than that. Hopefully we’ll be seeing something from inside the game soon enough. As a concept, it sounds fascinating – just hardcore surviving, improvising, scrabbling to keep going. It’s what zombies were made for.

The game changes depending on how you'd like to play. When I was alone in the single player game I enjoyed the more deliberate pace, and I rejected the few missions available during the demo to simply explore the island and play with the many improvised weapons while killing every zombie I saw. There is a heavy emphasis on melee weapons in this game, which means that the zombies get very close to you, and that's a nerve-wracking experience. It takes practice before you can judge the reach of the many weapons, but soon enough you'll be chopping off heads and legs, or taking out the shambling horrors with thrown weapons.

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When you play with more people—up to three other players can drop in and out at will—the number of zombies is increased, and the result is a game that leans more toward action than survival horror. Working together with friends to take down the zombies while sharing items and weapons is a very good time, even if I was playing with someone in PR and another writer.