Dead Island 2 was announced only a few years after its 2011 predecessor, but it took nearly a decade for the sequel to come to life. Developer Dambuster Studios is the third studio working on the game, using this opportunity to build their Dead Island 2 from the ground up. While predictable for a game that has spent so long in development, jumping from multiple teams, the final game is a worthwhile follow-up, especially for fans of the original. Dead Island 2, like its predecessor, isn’t breaking new ground narratively, but a good hook leads you into the game’s various Los Angeles districts. The star of the show is the zombies and the gory and customizable action that ensues. Over 2000 corpses were mutilated, mutilated, electrified, burned, and dismembered during my time with Dead Island 2. I rolled the credits most excited about the carnage my tour through L.A. brought me. I only wish the rest of the game was as enticing.
Dead Island 2 doesn’t take long to get into the action. After a quick cutscene to set up this motif on Los Angeles and how it has become a dead island, I selected Amy, one of the six Slayers you can play as the game’s story. She is a Paralympian and an agile, speed-based character. While each of the six Slayers has a distinct personality and backstory as well as two unique innate abilities, I finished Dead Island 2 feeling that the role I played was a bit narrative. Amy would occasionally comment about how she needed to get out of Los Angeles to make it to her next running competition, but other than that, her barks and lines were normal enough that I wasn’t worried that I Was losing part of the big Dead Island. 2 legend by not playing through the game as each survivor.
Unlockable skill cards offer more of the variation I wanted. With 15 equippable slots, I get to play Amy much like I was fighting, using her ground pound, scream, attack and more against her. While some cards offer abilities usable against the undead, others are best described as perks that activate in combat, such as my favorite which appears every time I complete a dodge or If I block, I restore some health. This card, combined with letting me use moves learned from nearby zombies, allows my Amy to play to her strength: agility. I was focusing less on hitting and less on hitting hard, but I could see how other cards would result in different approaches to combat. The cards are easy to understand and fun to collect, which encourages me to try different ones often. It is the systems and weapons where players find the most differences between playthroughs.
Dead Island 2’s story takes Amy through many of the places you’d expect to go in Los Angeles, from Beverly Hills to movie studios to the Santa Monica Pier and of course Hollywood Boulevard. It’s not a gripping story, and quickly takes a back seat to exploring the world and killing zombies, but it’s serviceable, with the kind of characters you’d expect from a Hollywood A-lister in a post-apocalyptic world. Will look forward to running in LA. Or the washed up Rockstar. It also speeds well, rarely overstaying its welcome and letting me go right back to the action when I start to miss it. But ultimately, this isn’t a story that will stay with me for long, even as the team continues to set up more adventures with this cast.
Whenever I used to visit a new place, I used to get excited about each place. They’re lovingly designed, almost as if you were getting the greatest hits of each locale, perfect for the tourist romp through Los Angeles that Dead Island 2 ends.
Dead Island 2’s visual design makes each location even more memorable – the game’s art is stunning at times. The landscape is bright and saturated, and much of this world is soaked in blood, gore, and end-of-the-world storytelling. Zombies, dead and alive, paint the walls of celebrity mansions, caustic gut bubbles in hallways throughout famous hotels, and my hack and slash only paint the streets red. The extreme gore throughout my nearly 20 hours was shocking. Literal heads rolled, hands ripped apart, and guts ejected from abdominal cavities as I watched their arms tear through flesh. I would have liked the action to have arrived a few hours quicker, but once it did, it kept creeping up to the end.
I loved how I could customize the different weapons to deal more damage to the undead. Weapons, of which there are a ton, vary in rarity and allow for greater customization with rare weapon mods and enhancements. Perks allow you to increase weapon damage, change movement speed, increase durability, and more, and I liked that some offered pros with cons, which made me think more about why. What I wanted to be a weapon. Adding fire, electricity, caustic acid, bleed and other enhancements to my weapons lent itself well to the immersive sim-like nature present in Dead Island 2’s world, as did throwables like chemical bombs and zombie-luring bait. “Curveball”.
Throughout Los Angeles, I found water spigots, power lines, gasoline spills, and other environmental signs aiding in the destruction. And they are easy to read too. My Electric Wolverine Claws can electrify water and the zombies within it, which gives him a constantly damaging electrified status effect. Same goes for fire and gasoline and other combos. Once shotguns, pistols, assault rifles, and submachine guns were added to the game, I had even more range in combat, both from a literal perspective and in a new way with Dead Island 2’s immersive sim elements. could talk.
Dambuster Studios uses these elements to create short and sweet puzzles to access loot and collectibles, and much of my post-campaign enjoyment came from these. The side quests are fine, with some of the better people leaning heavily into the caricature version of Los Angeles that I imagine most people who don’t live there, like me, have a great deal of influence over the city and its people. I loved shooting zombies atop a cringe hype house on camera so an influencer can show his followers what’s going on here, and another using movie set fireworks to destroy a horde of zombies. These side quests, like the main quests, flashed through at a fast pace. But sometimes, those areas become wave-based arenas where killing zombies becomes tiresome, especially in the later third of the game.
Most of the fun is in short bursts of combat while mowing down handfuls of zombies. But some setpieces in the game throw dozens of zombies at you and the thrill of combat can become a chore. The immersive sim elements and skill card abilities help spice up these sequences, but eventually, killing waves of zombies in the same area quickly gets boring. This issue notably detracts from the more interesting open area combat that takes place throughout much of the game, especially outside of the main story quest.
With Dead Island 2 behind me, I’m thrilled that Dambuster Studios can take something we first learned about in 2014 and successfully bring it to the finish line with their own take on the series’ vision. Dead Island 2 looks, and sounds, like a 1990s B-movie horror comedy, and the team leans into that absolute bore with its systems. Zombie destruction is at the heart of the game, and Dead Island 2 has a lot of systems to engage with and a lot of zombies to destroy. Fast paced, and I appreciate how much side content is available within them to keep each journey enjoyable. This game won’t stick with me for long, but I’m not sure it was meant to. With Dead Island 2, Dambuster Studios asks little of the player – only that you enjoy a good excuse for a week or two to slay zombies in increasingly gory ways – and in doing so, it takes the series by storm. About what promises.