Dead Island 2
It’s been nine years since Dead Island 2 was announced, and the zombie bash-’em-up has finally been dragged out of development hell. Is it worth your time… or dead on arrival?
Los Angeles is many things, but one thing it most definitely isn’t is an island. That might make it seem a curious choice for the setting of Dead Island 2, but the sands of Venice Beach certainly suit the theme of a zombie-ravaged paradise.
Rather than letting you loose to find a way to escape the city, LA’S fairly large and detailed districts follow a linear pattern of waypoints barred by missing circuit breakers or locked doors; but traversing them on foot isn’t as engaging as the parkour in, for example, Dying Light. The game clearly wants you to engage with the undead rather than running away, and there is fun in brutally maiming zombies if you want to admire all the gory injury details, but the impact of melee attacks feels inconsistent. And while it’s also possible to use the environment against the undead, it’s too easy to get caught by your own traps.
When firearms become available partway through the campaign, the gunplay isn’t on the same level as a typical first-person shooter, but these weapons do have a dull efficiency that means you’re most likely to fall back on them. Yet even then, given the frequency with which zombies are milling about with their backs turned to you when you’re exploring the city, it’s bizarre that there’s no option for stealth takedowns.
An online co-op mode means having someone to revive you if you’re downed, but it also seems to increase the already annoying sponginess of enemies, while the cutscenes don’t include the extra characters playing.
Considering it took nearly a decade for Dead Island 2 to see the light of day, it’s remarkably rough around the edges, with a plethora of bugs – some funny, some frustrating – plaguing our playthrough. In a way it should probably be considered a miracle that the game managed to emerge at all, but in this case that might not be a good thing. Alan Wen