All it took was a trailer, and suddenly everyone was talking about Dead Island. The game's introduction featured a reverse-chronological look at a family being attacked by zombies, and word instantly spread through every kind of social media. Everyone was talking about the game, but no one knew what the game itself looked like.

After a 45-minute demo at this year's Game Developers Conference, we know. It's a mixed bag, but the time we spent with the game marks it as one to watch. Here's what we saw.

Damn, son

The game features four characters to choose from, each with different attributes and playing styles, and you can play through the game multiple times as each one for a slightly different experience. There will also be drop-in and drop-out multiplayer, so the co-op experience will be a big draw for the game. The player we saw in our demo was a one-hit wonder rapper who said things like "damn," often, and would remark on kills using plenty of four letter words. Oh, stereotypical African-American characters... will gaming ever grow tired of you?

The game takes place on a tropical island, but the environments will include a jungle, a city, interiors, exteriors, and everything in between. The developers promise a wide variety of environments to fight through, and you'll be killing zombies with a variety of hand-to-hand weapons and even some firearms. The game is played in the first person, and the battles against the undead will be a close, intimate affair.

The actual combat looks strong—we saw the character break the left arm of one zombie only to be clobbered by the right—but the interactions between the characters are a little stilted, and the voice acting isn't as strong as we would like. Still, the game has it where it counts. It's a tense, often brutal game, although we saw precious little of the emotion and tone of the trailer that caused everyone to fall in love with the game.

There will be vehicle missions, a black market, and the ability to mix and match objects to create new weapons. You'll just need to find items to combine, blueprints, workbenches, and... where have we heard this before? That prompted me to ask if the developers are worried about being compared to Dead Rising 2. "No, because we're never going for the funny stuff. We're doing weapons that make sense, and upgrading what you have," they told me. "You can sharpen a machete as you saw, or you can attach a battery and make it a stun gun of sorts." They're not taping a paddle to a chainsaw, they pointed out, but I have to say, is making a stun gun with a knife and a battery that much different?

There are slow zombies, there are fast zombies, and there are zombies that look like they were infected by the Flood and explode when shot. Hmmmm.

Killing the zombies in fun ways will get you experience points, and you'll use those points to level up and create a zombie-killing machine no matter what character you play as. Your friends can jump in and out of your game at will to help you survive. The setting is goofy, the voice-acting is subpar, and many of these concepts seem to have been borrowed from past games, but it all looks good. Certainly goofier than we were hoping for based on the trailer, but I went into the appointment excited about the game, and left wanting to get my hands on it and play some more. That's a win, no matter how you cut it.

We're told that you'll begin to feel for these characters and see some more emotion in the game as things progress, but based on our time with the game this is more of a fun—but ultraviolent—look at what would happen if zombies took over paradise. As I watched the developers throw axes at the shambling horrors and cut their heads off, I began to think that this may be enough to get everyone's attention.

Dead Island is coming to the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC, and will feature between 20 and 30 hours of open-world zombie killing fun. We're hoping to go hands-on with the game at E3, but for now, we're satisfied with what we saw. The voice acting may be a little rough, but as long as the core action is this good, it's easy to overlook.