It was the second trip through the GOAT Pen that convinced us Dead Island 2 wasn’t going to get too serious.
The streamer mansion in the glittery, blood-soaked streets of Bel Air had most of the jokes you’d expect: An apology template on a whiteboard, several camera setups for podcasts, streams, and photoshoots, a fancy wine room that didn’t look like it had ever been entered pre- or post-zombie apocalypse. But the nighttime mission to eliminate zombie swarms in creative ways for a video upload from the house’s lone surviving content creator had us laughing from the wanton, fleshy destruction long before we realized that the side mission was trying to prepare us for the type of environmental awareness we’d need to beat, bludgeon, and barbecue the zombies that the game had in store.
“The zombie genre has become very serious and earnest and beige and survivalist,” Dambuster Studios creative director James Worral told Dot Esports in an interview following an early media preview of Dead Island 2. According to Worral, the studio’s resurrection of the Dead Island franchise (counting the remaster, this is the seventh game in the series) takes far more from ‘80s and ‘90s sci-fi and horror films than it does from contemporary zombie games and media. The people are the good guys. The monsters are the bad guys. And the point of the game is killing the bad guys.
That doesn’t mean there’s a complete lack of nuance in the game’s approach to storytelling. One of Dead Island 2’s companions, a Hollywood scream queen actress whose mansion serves as an early safe house, quite immediately goes back to being a miserable brat upon arriving back at her home and realizing her Latina housekeeper is already there with her family seeking refuge. Worral also mentioned how the main characters will have to learn about themselves from the zombies in light of their immunity to turning into undead cannon fodder. But the simplistic approach to storytelling does allow players to take on the role of action heroes seeking to fix the problems immediately around them with lead pipes and electrified machetes instead of taking too long reckoning with a “commentary on the human condition, and human society, and ‘humans are a cancer on the Earth and we deserve everything we get,’ blah blah blah,” as Worral put it.
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Dead Island 2, much like its predecessors, is a game about killing zombies. But unlike its predecessors, Dead Island 2 doesn’t seem like it’s going to take a hard left turn into a poor man’s imitation of Far Cry. The story might get more serious in tone past the point where the demo we played ended, but the core gameplay is still all about killing zombies in increasingly zany ways.
The game’s much-publicized F.L.E.S.H. system works as advertised: You will dismember and maim zombies in the extreme, and it rules. Limbs strip, break, and fall away. Jaws dislocate; skin burns and crisps. The gore is a feast for the senses and is so over-the-top that it fully moves past disgusting and into a magical land of dark comedy. The improvised weapons and modifications you can add to them (Worral told Dot we had only seen about a third of the game’s total mods in our demo, and we had enough to create a considerable arsenal already) only add to the fun. You’ll be crushing zombies with golf clubs and flamethrower garden rakes in no time at all.
The up-close melee combat was the primary element that Worral said Dambuster wanted to keep from the original Dead Island games, and that choice keeps the new title feeling true to its predecessors while also updating the formula around that core in many ways. There will be guns in Dead Island 2 as well, but our demo didn’t get that far into the game. If you want to kill a zombie, you’ve got to get in its face and do it yourself.
“We just wanted to make zombies fun again,” Worral told Dot. And once that core melee combat mechanic was decided upon as the cornerstone, the rest of the game flowed from it. “That’s what we focused on… and once we built that F.L.E.S.H. engine and how that reacts with all the animations and the AI feedback. We think that gives you a kind of fuzzy analog combat system, which allows players to really push their skill levels and it gives them a real depth to that combat.”
It’s certainly not The Last of Us, and it’s not trying to be. Instead, Dead Island 2 wants to welcome players into its fleshy, bloody arms with a fun, over-the-top combat experience. And if the early demo was anything to go by, it’s succeeding in that pursuit.
