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Dead Island 2 Review: Escape from development HELL-A

Please get me out of here.

Dead Island 2 has spent many, many years in development limbo over at Deep Silver — first attached to Yager, then Sumo Digital and, now, Homefront The Revolution’s Dambuster. Once thought of as vapourware, I think it should have stayed as such after playing it.

First announced back in 2014, Dead Island 2 is a decidedly different beast then when first imagined. Players will now fill the shoes of one of six survivors in the aftermath of a plane crash right in the heart of LA (known as HELL-A in the game, and there’s no way I’ll be using that term ever again). Moving through LA from suburb to suburb — including the likes of Beverly Hills, Bel-Air, Venice Beach and other places you’ve heard of on TV — you’ll work with fellow survivors to do just that: persist.

A first-person affair, the gameplay loop is pretty simple: find (or craft, through repairing or reconfiguring) weapons and lay waste to whatever zombies are in the way of your objective. Dead Island 2‘s true claim to fame is in the way in which you can dispatch your enemies; zombies are bags of limbs, flesh and blood. Each practically begs you to dismember, maim and gratuitously torture them through elemental damage systems relying on fire, electricity and acid. The peeling of flesh from bone admittedly looks great; that is, until its impact is lost due to a relentless sea of blood and on-screen numbers reflecting damage given or taken.

Combat is equal parts thrilling and frustrating. When facing a handful of baddies, you can really mix and match systems to devastating effect. I tended to craft weapons with electric capabilities, and that worked well when coupled with jerrycans of water or backyard pools. In the case of the latter, you can rig up a shockingly effective trap by turning on a live wire, throwing in a battery or simply sending a charge through a baddie with your weapon of choice, and then kicking them into the deep end so they can pass the current through to others in the water.

This dreamlike situation sadly occurs far less frequently than marketing would have you believe. More often than not, you’re forced to juggle extremely breakable weapons as dozens of zombies bear down upon you, wildly attempting to swap away from a fire-type weapon because the horde ahead of you is already on fire. Or, because one zombie in the group is a higher level than you and you’re barely putting a dent into it. As you’re trying to use subpar blocking and countering mechanics — that once again work with a couple enemies and not with groups — you’ll almost certainly be stunned by the ground pound of a bigger baddie, or find your health is rapidly plummeting because you’re in the area of effect of an electric zombie. Or electrocute yourself because you’re standing too close to the enemy you’ve just shocked.

Ranged weaponry helps with some of these gripes to a small degree, but they’re not introduced until around your fifth hour. The same is true for Dead Island 2‘s card system; while there are certainly cards to mix and match later on in the game, you’re working with a small, standard set for far too long. The same goes for Fury mode, in which you finally get to tap into whatever a zombie bite leaves behind in a survivor. This also applies to fast travel, and mods. As such, there’s not any flexibility to cater to a specific playstyle of your choosing for hours upon hours into the game, and by then you’re either frustrated, bored, or just plain ol’ done.

Co-op also helps to alleviate some of these pain points, but that only suits those who like to find time to play with their friends… or who are willing to potentially suffer with randoms.

While LA itself isn’t an island, Dambuster has sectioned it off into island-like hub areas, thereby steering clear of a modern day open-world to explore. There are many main and side missions to be found within each, but they’re always fetch or extermination quests of some kind. In either case, be prepared to look out for a yet another circuit breaker to open a corresponding electric gate, or be prepared to fend off wave after wave of baddies while something happens — very slowly — around you. On rarer occasions, you’ll need to walk around a smaller area and mash A until you find the pieces of evidence (and corresponding percentage counter in the top right) that give you the newest passcode needed for a terminal, or revelation in an investigation. To say that Dead Island 2 is very repetitious is an understatement.

I — like Hamish in his preview — took to running from objective to objective whenever possible, ignoring combat for the reasons I’ve stated above. While some of this was to simply get through what was on offer, more was actually due to necessity. While you can easily craft and upgrade new weapons, proper health is a little harder to come by. Most missions devolve into an exercise in frustration where you can’t exit back to the main hub and, with ever-depleting resources, have to best a horde or a boss. Dying will cause you to suffer within an archaic checkpointing system that forces you to replay dialogue or cutscenes each and every time, but doesn’t feel it necessary to provide replenished health or resource drops.

Before I get too far away from the idea of running, I need to address movement mechanics. It’s clear that Dambuster put a lot of effort into combat animations — smacking a zombie across the jaw with a heavy sledgehammer really does satisfy — and not into general movement. Your character runs so very slowly and it all feels so unnatural. While Dying Light 2 wasn’t a stellar title, it really had traversal down patDead Island 2 certainly could have taken some lessons from it.

Each playable character has a different set of stats and bonuses, though they’re less unique in that they’re all immune to the virus that’s causing everyone else around them to become zombies. I opted for Jacob, a London-born stockbroker turned Hollywood stuntman who also doubles the game’s cover star, and almost immediately regretted the decision. Jacob’s voice actor isn’t great, sounding bored in some scenes and inappropriately enthusiastic in others. His inconsistent vibe is matched by NPCs around him and, I’d wager, the rest of Dead Island 2‘s playable characters. Each and every performance is hindered by generic dialogue and one-liners; every character spouts irritating, dated, shallow lines that would have barely been tolerated back in 2014.

As a result, you don’t care about your character. Equally so, you’re not invested in the rag-tag group of LA influencers that have banded together to survive in Bel-Air. All of that means there’s little motivation to slog through extremely same-y missions and side quests. It’s this general feeling that permeates throughout Dead Island 2; what’s on offer isn’t broken or flagrantly bad (with the exception of the checkpointing system), but it is tired, antiquated and bland.

Unless you’re a die-hard fan of the franchise, there are far better first-person apocalypse simulators to turn to than Dead Island 2.

5 out of 10

Dead Island 2 was reviewed using a promotional code on Xbox Series S & X, as provided by the publisher. Click here to learn more about Stevivor’s scoring scale.

Dead Island 2

21 April 2023
PC PS4 PS5 Xbox One Xbox Series S & X
 

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About the author

Steve Wright

Steve's the owner of this very site and an active games journalist nearing twenty (TWENTY!?!) years. He's a Canadian-Australian gay gaming geek, ice hockey player and fan. Husband to Matt and cat dad to Wally and Quinn.