E3-some: What We’re Looking Forward to at E3 2011

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Dead Island

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What We Know Already: No trailer’s ever generated the kind of buzz that the promo clip for Dead Island did earlier this year. The horror of a zombie apocalypse is driven home by watching a hapless family on vacation get attacked by the undead, with a gut-wrenching sequence in which a daughter gets bitten and must be abandoned by her mother and father. The game itself unfolds as a first-person adventure.

The Big Mystery: What caused the outbreak? Banoi’s the vacation paradise where Dead Island happens and you’ll get to play as one of four characters who, luckily or unluckily, survive the chaos. Why the survivors are on the island, why they lived and what turned ordinary folks into abominations are all questions that playing the game will answer.

What We’ll Probably Find Out: Will it make you cry? Dead Island combines the elements of lots of different zombie games: weapons crafting from Dead Rising, co-op from the Left 4 Dead series, the specific dismemberment of Dead Space and Dead Space 2. But the end result promises to feel like something new. You’ve got speedy zombies, ones who use weapons and others with special abilities fighting against human survivors who will themselves have upgradeable skills. And if all of that’s in service to a powerful story, then Dead Island could reap rewards all its own.

(More from TIME.com: My Favorite Zombie: The Boomer from ‘Left4Dead‘)

Tomb Raider

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What We Know Already: Signs of a total reboot for gaming’s first sex symbol surfaced earlier this year when news surfaced that a new Tomb Raider was coming down the pike. Then, screens and previews indicated that this was to be a younger, less worldly Lara stranded on a remote island where she’d have to survive by her wits and archery, without the use of those trademark pistols.

The Big Mystery: Who is this Lara Croft? The previous iteration of video games’ most prominent heroine became an icon because of specific qualities: aristocratic toughness, ingenuity under pressure and over-the-top sexiness. Two of those things, at least, appear to no longer be in play in the trailer above. But, New Lara might just find other ways to be a compelling character in her own right.

What We’ll Probably Find Out: What’s going on with that weird island? While most of that trailer unfolds in a deeply realistic fashion, the scenes of Lara waking up show a lot of shipwrecks on the shore of the mystery island. Tomb Raider games always added a bit of the otherworldly to their plots and there just might be supernatural elements in this reboot as well. Lara may not be an archaeologist anymore, but that doesn’t mean she won’t be able to uncover secrets

(More on TIME.com: Lara Croft to Get Reboot in New ‘Tomb Raider’ Game)

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