I’ve got to hand it to Dambuster Studios. To take over development of a project like Dead Island 2 and actually stick the landing is no mean feat. Mired in development hell for nearly a decade, Dead Island 2 saw two developers fall by the wayside before publisher Deep Silver brought it in-house and gave it to Dambuster.
Picking up and running with something somebody else has already worked on is never easy either, especially when it comes to games. And let’s not forget, 10 years is an eternity in gaming. The original Dead Island was released in 2011. Do you know what else was released in 2011? Skyrim. Arkham City. Gears of War 3.
Do you know what else was released in 2011? Duke Nukem Forever. Funny coincidence right? And Duke Nukem Forever was famously in development for 14 years, which is only 3 years longer than Dead Island 2. Thankfully, Dead Island 2 does not suffer the same fate as Duke Nukem Forever.
Dead Island 2 is entertaining, well-designed, engaging and fun.
Dead Island 2 Review
While I moderately enjoyed Dead Island 2 when I got to preview it earlier this year, I was somewhat underwhelmed and did not expect to enjoy the game as much as I did. Yes, the criticisms and complaints I had about the game in my preview still stand but weighed against the game as a whole they’re much less problematic. The humour is still very much hit-and-miss and the comedy remains as broad as ever and is as subtle as a sledgehammer to the head. But I did find myself relaxing into things as the hours wore on and what I might have rolled my eyes at earlier in proceedings would elicit a chuckle or even a full-on laugh.
This mostly comes down to your choice of Slayer and the charisma of their voice actor. Your chosen Slayer will narrate just about everything, so if you don’t gel with them at the off, you’re better off restarting, choosing someone else and trying again. How well you enjoy listening to them is far more important than their individual stats and powers. Sure, each Slayer does (kind of) play differently than the others, but it doesn’t make an enormous difference to the gameplay. Your enjoyment of the game though, that’s going to be fundamentally impacted by your choice of Slayer and how much you jibe with their vibe.
The other major impact on how much mileage you get out of Dead Island 2 is how well you enjoy the combat. Honestly, if I didn’t like the combat as much as I did in Dead Island 2 the score at the bottom of this review would be markedly different. Dead Island 2 is repetitive. Really repetitive. Every quest, at its most simple, is a fetch quest. You head to a location on your map, you kill a bunch of zombies, you occasionally locate the MacGuffin, and you head back to base. Rinse and repeat. Thankfully, it’s the journey and the friends fiends you make along the way that makes it worthwhile.
Dead Island 2 is very quick to open up crafting, mods and upgrades to you. It’s not long after booting up the game and playing the tutorial/prologue that you’ve gotten your greasy mitts on an electrified machete and you’re hacking Palpatine-style zombies to pieces. And weapon mods don’t end with electricity. Oh no. You’ve got fire. You’ve got alkaline zombie melting juice. You’ve got extra impact and best of all, you’ve got mutilator mods…just in case the gore wasn’t enough and you really wanted to hack the bone. These weapons of mass destruction come in a number of flavours outside the delicious mods too.
Bats, hammers and the like are Bulldozers. Swords and fist-based weapons are Frenzy, some others are Headhunters (which do crits to the head) and finally Maiming weapons do crits to limbs. Personally, I favoured Frenzy with Mutilator mods just for the sheer amount of blood, gore and violence. Oh and because I could pretend I was reenacting the Black Knight from Holy Grail. Hehe…Ni.
There is some strategy to your choice and use of weapons beyond pure pleasure or turning one zombie into 15 different parts of zombie. Burning zombies aren’t affected by Fire mods like the belching melty zombies aren’t affected by the Alkali mods. Some zombies wear armour and riot gear so you’ll need to break that before you can get to the gooey insides; something which Bulldozers excel at. You’re able to carry a shit load of weapons too and have many equipped at the one time making changing (via the weapon wheel) a piece of piss. That being said, I became very fond of my vampiric katana so I would just go to town on everything with that, absorb health and keep chopping until there was nothing left but a fine red mist.
Beyond the melee weapons, Dead Island 2 does (eventually) arm you to the teeth with firearms, but I’ll be honest, I barely used them. They just aren’t anywhere near as fun as the melee weapons and they don’t feel remotely as good to use. Ammo isn’t too scarce, you can craft it and you can mod your guns just like you can your melee weapons but it just doesn’t feel the same. Mechanically, shooting feels great and the actual gameplay is fine, it’s just that shooting a zombie can’t compare to the thrill of taking one apart at close range with fiery blades attached to your gloves. It comes down to personal preference and I’m sure there’ll be players who love the shooting, but for me, Dead Island 2 is all about getting up close and taking a blood shower.
Dead Island 2’s melee combat is helped greatly by the skill system. As you progress you unlock Skill Cards and additional Skill Card slots which vastly impact and change the way you play. There are four main categories of Skill Card; Abilities, Survivor, Slayer and Numen. In addition to unlocking cards by levelling up, you’ll find them hidden around the maps, as rewards for killing tough zombies and for completing quests. It’s within the Skill Cards menu that you get to really customise and craft your character. I focused on increasing attack speed through kills and dealing damage so that my Frenzy weapons killed faster and faster the more I killed. There are so many options though that the Skill Cards can suit any playstyle. If you want to be more defensive and focus on countering and dodging zombies you most certainly can. If you want to go ham and get health from killing, you can do that too.
However you can imagine your Slayer, you can probably make a build through the Skill Cards to bring that to life. Later on in the game, when you eventually unlock Fury and Numen cards you can really go to town on your build and have fun with your play style. There are also Pathogen cards that contribute to your Pathogen level. This is an additional meter with three levels. The more Pathogen cards you equip, the higher your Pathogen level and the greater the benefits and detriments you’ll experience. At level three Pathogen you gain health back for killing zombies and deal bonus damage the more kills you get but your health packs only heal you for a fraction of what they normally would. One Pathogen Card I found allowed me to activate Fury with only half the gauge full, but it also made the Fury gauge constantly decrease unless I was actively killing zombies or it was 100% full. There are lots of gameplay choices like this and it’s within the Skill Cards and weapon mods that Dead Island 2 shines brightest.
Outside of the triumph that is Dead Island 2’s combat, you’ll spend your time looting, exploring, chatting with morons and discovering the true nature of the epidemic and the zombies. The story went to some places I wasn’t expecting and while it’s not going to win any awards for literature it’s a fun romp that goes well with the game and lore established with the first Dead Island. I have to say though, the ending does come up quite quickly and unexpectedly and is something of an anticlimax. It screams story DLC in the future and I’m ok with that because more Dead Island 2 is fine by me.
Something I found quite strange was the requirement for cash when upgrading or crafting. I didn’t understand the in-game or gameplay logic for requiring cash to upgrade and it was often tricky to have enough. Eventually, I settled on selling every weapon I wasn’t going to use which solved my cash problem but created a resource one. By selling every weapon to have enough cash to upgrade and repair my weapons, I started to run out of the resources I would acquire if I was breaking every weapon down. Even when I focused on looting, scrapping half of my weapons and selling the others, I was always low on one item or another. It feels as though the balance isn’t quite right at this stage because Dead Island 2 doesn’t feel like a survival game. Running out of resources and being prevented from engaging with the best parts of the game (mods, weapons and combat) at the highest level feels like an unfair punishment and not in the spirit of the game. You can, of course, just go and loot more to collect what you need though when you get in a rhythm and have to stop to go collect stuff, it’s kind of a bummer.
Beyond the main quest there are also quite a few side quests and missions to discover and complete. These consist of combat challenges, fetch quests and the like, but they help to FLESH out HELL-A and offer some variation on the objectives within Dead Island 2.
For a game this long in development, Dead Island 2 is pleasantly pretty, at least on Xbox Series X. It’s smooth, fast and colourful though the environments are tight and enclosed which clearly helps. HELL-A is gorgeously rendered as are the zombies in their many layers of flesh, blood and bone. The FLESH system is beyond gore. It’s bordering on obscene how gory this game is. When you crack open a zombie’s skull, you can see its brains pulsing inside. When you smash it in the face, its eyeballs pop out of their sockets and dangle. It’s actually fucking gross but in the best possible way.
Do I have a problem…? Nah…I’m fine. Right?
Dead Island 2 is a sum much greater than its parts. By rights, a game with gameplay roots and mechanics harkening back over 10 years shouldn’t be this much fun in 2023, but it is. A game that is mostly fetch quests shouldn’t be this good in 2023, but it is. A game this shamelessly gory and with such a narrow focus, shouldn’t be this good in 2023 but it really fucken is. It’s pure, unadulterated escapism. It’s a video game being as much of a video game as it can be. And that is absolutely a beautiful thing.
Dead Island 2 is a must-play.
Dead Island 2 was reviewed on Xbox Series X using digital code provided by the publisher.
