Dead Island 2’s slayer customization lets players kill zombies any way they want

Dead Island 2, Dambuster Studios’ new entry in the Dead Island franchise, features tons of different zombies, and an equally exorbitant amount of ways to kill them. That’s down to Dambuster giving players oodles of tools to kill zombies with, from weapons to environmental kills, and the F.L.E.S.H. system that lets players quite literally dismantle their undead foes. But part and parcel of these options are the different characters players can choose to rip their way through Hell-A as.

Called “slayers,” each character brings their own abilities, stats, and highly-caffeinated commentary to Dead Island 2. But while the differences from character to character to character can sometimes feel negligible, there’s a certain magic to the game’s approach to building on those skills and traits through Skill Cards.

“There is a Skill Card for every playstyle,” Dambuster Studios creative director James Worral told Dot Esports in an interview following an early media preview of the game. He’s not joking, either: even in the brief preview that we played, in which many of the slayers’ skills remained locked, there were dozens of combinations of Skill Cards to equip and try out different ways of taking on the zombie hordes that waited for us.

Want a high-damage option with a jumping kick? There’s a card for that. What about a crowd-control jump kick that sends zombies flying instead? There’s a card for that, too. You can maximize your damage, or try to become so quick that no zombie can hit you. And the best part about all these different skill cards is that they can be swapped out on the fly, whenever you want, even in the midst of a fight.

Different characters with their own abilities and skill trees were a hallmark of the original Dead Island games, and Dead Island 2 dives into that tradition with enthusiasm. But where the original Dead Island required players to methodically plan out which skills to unlock so that they could progress further on a skill tree, the Skill Card system is far more free-flowing. Skill Cards are found and unlocked periodically, but you don’t have to worry about missing out on them if you don’t immediately choose to equip one. In fact, the game actively encourages you to try as many different Cards as you want.

Learning which Skill Cards pair well with your slayer and your preferred method of play is all part of the fun. And fun is exactly what this game strives to be at every turn.

To that end, these slayers are anything but ordinary people with ordinary traumas. Jacob, the game’s poster boy, is an English, Shakespeare-spouting stuntman. Dani the Irish roller derby girl will teach you dozens of new ways to swear, while Carla is as sunny as she is brawny. Amy the Paralympian and Bruno the hustler are the game’s shifty, quick characters, both with their own distinctly SoCal personalities. Finally, there’s Ryan the exotic dancer, who appears to con his way onto an emergency flight out of L.A. by pretending the firefighter costume he normally peels off for work is the real thing.

All of these are considerable improvements on the original Dead Island‘s character options, all of which seemed like rather drab archetypes save for Sam B., the one-hit wonder rapper. And while Dead Island 2‘s slayer dialogue might not be spawning a critically-acclaimed HBO show anytime soon, this group did keep us entertained well enough during the game’s first-person cutscenes.

Just how these characters work together is still a bit of a mystery. While Worral confirmed to Dot that Dead Island 2 will have a co-op mode, Dambuster still wasn’t quite ready to talk about the specifics of how playing with friends will work. On the other hand, Worral did mention that since “every playstyle” is enabled by the game’s Skill Cards, those skills will affect teamwork, as well: “There are Skill Cards that bleed into the co-op space and have effects in co-op.”

Between the Skill Cards and the characters, the skill system in Dead Island 2 feels like a pleasantly fast-paced upgrade of a dated progression system that will keep players engaged for hours on end. And with even more information still to come on co-op play and many of the game’s Skills still to be revealed, there’s even more zombie-killing potential still to be discovered.