I constantly felt like I was overextending my attacks and accounting for sluggish animations, the rigid right-stick camera quickly becoming the bane of my existence. The old-school approach to first-person melee combat feels both lethargic and frustrating here. I just wish there was a better game to wrap it around. The sheer anatomical extravaganza of Dead Island 2 is a compelling reason to play, and its most forward-thinking feature. Eyeballs hang daintily out of sockets and jaws swing loose as undeterred zombies shamble toward you, their charred skin giving way to slimy blood. Repeated attacks break through skin, muscle, fat, and bone, making zombie bodies feel like flesh piñatas, with accidental dismemberments aplenty. An insufferable movie star invites you to their McMansion in Beverly Hills to regroup, and you plot your way through the City of Angels to (hopefully) become part of the cure.ĭead Island 2 returns, and it’s like the last 10 years never happened Alas, the infection spreads onboard, the plane crashes, and in the ensuing chaos, you discover that you’re immune. You play as one of six “slayers” who conveniently congregate on the last flight out of a quarantined Hell-A, Dambuster’s pulpy pastiche of Los Angeles. If, like me, you’ve acquired a taste for brevity in recent years, you’ll be pleased to hear that you can finish this game in a reasonable amount of time. Most importantly, it’s not another checklist death march. It’s a relic that is rough around the edges, but its linearity feels refreshing, and the gore-heavy combat offers constant, visceral spectacle.

The final result of this fraught process, delivered by Nottingham’s Dambuster Studios, can sometimes feel like an old friend.ĭead Island 2’s acerbic tone and dated systems summon a strange nostalgia for the silly, straightforward, but moreish first-person action games that dominated the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 era. In the meantime, Dead Island’s original developer, Techland, has moved on to bigger and better things with its Dying Light series.

Over the course of a decade, its development has fallen to a trio of different studios, each attempting to shepherd a sequel to a moreish co-op zombie brawler from 2011.

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