2011’s original Dead Island and its 2013 sequel Torrent have a special place in the rancid, festering hearts of games journalists of a certain age and older — if “special” is the right word. Their design and promotion captures an era of gaming that hasn’t quite passed. On the one hand, there’s a CGI trailer for Dead Island that’s powerfully tear-jerking, reverse-engineered to depict a little girl’s final moments – a piece of cinematic magic and a bid for Blockbuster’s eternally coveted status, which I have a feeling for. On the other hand, Riptide’s cheesy zombie bikini models pre-order collectibles.
Put those two things together and it’s classic AAA culture in a nutshell: artistic ambition meets smirking silliness, prestige melodrama meets dashing guts and cleavage, all around a A moderately fun co-op action RPG unfolds, about battling zombies with random weapons, which in hindsight feels like Patient Zero for a cheater like Bungie’s Destiny.
Meanwhile, Dead Island 2 was once synonymous with vapourware: Announced in 2014 with Spec Ops: The Line developer Yager at the helm, eventually outsourced to licensed spinoff Sumo Digital, and eventually reassigned to Dambusters, atmospheric but underwhelming Homeland Defense: Revolution. This is the trip to the shelf where you want to leave a visible scar. In practice, Dead Island 2 is a smooth and fulfilling 20-plus hours of heisting that rarely errs, but never gets your heart pumping, and it’s easy to play in its not-so-insipid setting. It’s hard to do anything really interesting.
The action has moved from Papua New Guinea to the more posh locales of Los Angeles (the game insists on calling it “Hell-A” — please don’t encourage it), and the new playable characters are sparkly brutes who offer some of the biggest hits every day. Personal signature career traits and sarcastic self-deprecation about the last thing you saw and did. You’re here to escape, of course, but along the way you’ll rescue a naughty British actress from her Beverly Hills hermitage, bring the sewers to the beach, and end up embroiled in all sorts of crazy scientific schemes.
The scenery is baroque, closer to Homeland Defense: Revolution than Dead Island, for its disorganized sprawl, hotel corridors full of discarded objects, and storm drains smeared with entrails and graffiti. The world is no longer open – after all, how can you make an open-world Los Angeles game without drivable cars? – but a collection of separate loading areas consisting of NPC safe areas and wide routes between branching or circular mission areas (such as construction sites and police stations).
However, the pace of the game is much the same as it was in 2011: chopping up zombies and hoarding those crafting materials. With the same upfront emphasis on melee combat–you don’t get your guns until hours later, and you rarely have enough ammo to count on them–the zombies themselves are a familiar spread: the classic Romero-branded toddler And a quick 28-day post-stress, plus mid-bosses like a bloated bile vomiter and a torso-cracking ogre, borrowed from Left 4 Dead and Resident Evil, respectively.
Dead Island 2’s greatest design feat is how fluidly it blends the aforementioned act of carnage with the supporting RPG system. Zombies have levels just like you, and a gap of two or more levels can turn any additional undead into one-hit killers – designated by skull indicators. There are also elemental themed zombies that are immune to the type of damage they deal. But you rarely feel like you’re just punching numbers out of bodies: no matter what their level, enemies stagger, dismember, and fly back, their rotting bodies made of satisfying layers of skin and bone like gift wrap Peel off like paper, and take a hard hit to trigger a burst of slow motion. Melee weapons have different cadences, managed by a simple recharge stamina system. Ambushe Walker with a pair of crescent knuckles, grinning as it crunches and disintegrates under the accelerating speedbag combo. Hit one with a razor-wrapped sledgehammer, rattling as it takes off like a giblet-laden firework.
There are throwable “curveball” items to help control crowds–time dynamite, shurikens, vials of meat to attract crowds, and enemies mostly come in groups of five or more. There are also countless terrain traps to catch, from the inevitable exploding oil barrels to water barrels that can be thrown at circuit boxes to form electric pits. But what’s really exciting is simply bringing attackers together so that the entire gang can be knocked off the screen with a single horizontal swing. It cuts grass in The Legend of Zelda, but harder.
Still, it does get repetitive, not just because the game is overly fond of certain types of enemies, like ground-slamming bodybuilders, but because it’s another game held together by a progression system. It’s not really an exercise in playing the undead like in Capcom’s Dead Rising, where you put mascot heads on corpses and hit them with parasols for cool photos. The idea is to optimize the build to stay one step ahead of the difficulty arc formed by leveling up, and while the progression system is rather well-designed, the solidity threatens to put me to sleep.
Customization includes finding mods that plug in different rare weapons, as well as equipping skill cards that are passively unlocked, for example, replenishing stamina and health when you dodge. The weapons differ primarily in damage, speed, range and how well they knock attackers back, the mod applies status effects such as fire and bleed. The skill card system started out pretty bland–I immediately forgot what I had equipped, and the game periodically reminded me to check out a new card. But it gradually becomes more decisive as you get closer to the endgame and start thinking about all the side quests you missed (think “save this guy from a previously explored area”). Later, you’ll unlock a charged rage mode for a final pushback, as well as the more adventurous, risk-rewarding Autophage cards, which grant you stackable buffs and debuffs. While I haven’t spent much time with the three-player co-op mode, it feels like there’s a lot of room to set up different parties–one player fires Electric Uzis to paralyze the mob, so the other player has time to finish their burn bomb.
It all comes together nicely. But that’s absent in other RPG-related games, and any experience based on looting and leveling has the usual downsides. Nearly every side room, from the janitor’s closet to the portaloos, offers some scraps for the DIY-minded zombie-scrambler. These resources may stimulate exploration, but they also prevent you from seeing the world because you are too busy harvesting it. Entering a room, you rub the camera against the silhouette as if your character were a vacuum cleaner with a missing nozzle, fidgeting fidgeting with the collection button to suck up the raw material left in the flawless Teflon-sealed crumbs. You’ll hardly notice the difference between crafting materials for a particular style: as long as you keep searching mindlessly, you’ll eventually have enough for whatever mod weapon you might choose to assemble.
Dead Island 2 is far from the only game that gets bogged down like this, but it annoys me more than usual because the setting should be better. Take your eyes off all these bits and pieces, and Los Angeles in the game is both a moderately engaging social study and a playground that’s sometimes compared to the immersive sims of Looking Glass and Arkane. The game’s best moments come in the shape of a sprawling, impactful mansion, with its sloping levels of decorative swimming pools, tacky desert-island movie sets, underground bowling alleys, neon-lit wine cellars, countless room-sized couches and a bunch of Boring NFT-level wall art.
It’s a monument to madness that needs to be smashed and looted, and a legendary setting reminiscent of Prey and BioShock. For all its air of parody, it’s a place to spend real time, immersed in the absurdity of life that once lived inside those glass walls, and a quiet and pleasant tactical sandbox to choose your route between levels. Needless to say, there’s a side quest here, including live-streaming your own carnage, hacking zombified influencers, or knocking them off mansion roofs at the behest of viewers.
The looking glass is everywhere in Dead Island 2, even with the awkward player movement that keeps Homefront: Revolution on your mind (you can drag yourself into a car to avoid mobs, but you can’t parkour Like Dead Island’s sister Dying Light). It’s the inevitable Hollywood studio tour, where you’ll activate stage sound effects and grill rotten extras in racist B-movie makeup. There are ruined police stations full of tripwire traps that can be looped around and dismantled for ammo, as well as the occasional CSI-style beat where you’re poking around looking for a door combination or a key someone dropped. There are also a few tedious puzzles that involve turning a valve to repressurize the door mechanism, but they don’t come up too often to be annoying.
It all ties together in a familiar but compelling vision of Los Angeles as a concentration of extreme wealth and poverty refracted through the sordid prism of the film industry. It’s a perfect setting for an Arkane-style game, a place of brutality, possibility, and excess. But it all fades away with looting and upgrading. It feels like the developers just wanted the urgent simplicity of it all to go so far: while some select weapons are discovered by poking around the gaps, many others are tucked deflated behind doors, requiring you to find them from somewhere. The NPC center space where people buy fuse games. At times like this, the world of Dead Island 2 becomes something to unlock rather than explore.
If you haven’t played a undead-themed action RPG, or you have a mindless desire for a proper brand of the subgenre, Dead Island 2 might be worth your while. It definitely gets the pat on the back with the zombie dismantling part. If you’re neither, all the rugged design and flight organs in the world can’t hide the lingering excitement here. Dead Island 2 isn’t a bad game, but it does feel redundant, a sad conclusion to a project that’s been in development for nearly a decade. Still, at least they didn’t give us zombie booby merchandise this time around.
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