What feels like aeons after it was first announced, Dead Island 2 is finally here, and if you haven’t yet had your fill of zombie games, HELL-A makes for a sun-soaked zombie-bashing playground, armed with an array of wild weaponry. Has it been worth the wait, though?
The game picks up as a bunch of survivors try to make their escape from an overrun LA, taking the last flight out of the quarantined metropolis. Of course, that doesn’t go quite to plan. You  crash, get bitten and luckily discover that you’re not only immune, but are granted superpowers by the zombie virus.
While this is a sequel, it really feels more like a full reboot as you chase the promise of a vaccine, getting survivors to safety, and uncover the background of the outbreak and the government and military’s inevitable role in its disastrous fallout. It’s retreading such familiar zombie apocalypse ground and feels like it’s going through the motions as it does so, though there is a more up and offbeat tone throughout. There’s plenty of larger than life, if trope-filled characters, and some fun and bizarre elements like the army trying to melt zombies in acid pools — I’m sure that smells lovely.
If you were hoping for a big, open-world rendition of LA, this isn’t it. The city has been carved up into a dozen smaller locations from its landmarks and neighbourhoods. There’s Bel-Air and Beverly Hills, a pastiched Hollywood backlot, and once you get downtown, there’s wide open boulevards, the iconic Santa Monica pier and more. There’s moments where this feels like an open world, but it’s often a more linear feeling game as you follow that main path through the story with the yellow dots on the HUD leading the way.
The real meat of the game is the combat, and it’s as weighty, visceral and enjoyable as ever. You can acquire guns that do have some use, but really Dead Island 2 is all about its sensationalised melee combat. There’s gruesomely detailed FLESH damage model that emerges as you slice, dice, bash and mash the zombies — flaying flesh and carving off limbs to reveal the skeleton and organs that are still intact, before executing excessive finishing moves that see you cut them in half or punching through a face. Add that to drop kicks and hammer blows that can send them flying, and it’s slapstick comedy violence as opposed to being gross-out gore.
As you get more and more powerful, so do the zombie dangers that you face. After starting off with basic Shamblers, there’s faster Runners, hulking Crushers, Screamers and others that have powerful abilities. Even into the final third of the game, Dead Island 2 continues to dole out new special zombies, each one introduced as part of a fun boss battle set piece to punctuate the story.
Thankfully, you quickly start learning how to craft the ridiculous and over-the-top weapons that have become synonymous with Dead Island and Techland’s spiritual successor, Dying Light. Of course, strapping some batteries to a machete will make it a lightning sword, and this bag full of random junk will make that fire axe an axe of fire — that is, if you manage to hunt down the necessary blueprints for all of these mods and upgrades.
Elemental damage plays a huge role in what can be a more considered approach to combat, making use of pools of water, leaking gas canisters and throwable ‘curveballs’ to take out multiple enemies at once – electrocution being particularly handy for freezing them in place while you continue to deal damage. Dead Island 2 eventually takes it a few steps further than that, though, feeding off zombification for later weaponry.
Your abilities are also augmented by the zombie virus coursing through your character’s veins, eventually building up to include the Rage that sends you into a zombie-tearing frenzy for a few moments. Each character has a pair of innate abilities and strengths in combat — Dani, who I played as, is all about heavy attacks and critical damage — but after that there’s a card-based skill system that gradually opens up, giving you choices over character abilities as fundamental as blocking and dodging, giving incremental perks, or going in on risk-reward gameplay choices. This can be changed on the fly, so for a boss encounter, I shelved the cards that gave perks for repeated zombie kills in favour of getting health for a successful dodge, and the like.
There’s action RPG roots underneath all this, so reaching a new area means zombies are higher levelled and tougher, but there’s still an unusual ebb and flow to the amount of damage that zombies can soak up at times. It’s worth doing the odd side mission to help boost your XP, but you’ll also need to make sure you’re regularly stripping down and replacing your augmented weapons to deal high damage.
This is the kind of game that is at its best in co-op, letting you ramp up the silliness, combine over-the-top abilities, pick each other up if you’re downed, and generally just whale upon your enemies like your slapping pool cues off an undead barman’s head while Queen is blaring on the jukebox.
There’s just a few wrinkles and limitations to the three-player co-op that got on our nerves while playing, though they’re fairly slight in the grand scheme of things. Firstly, there’s no cross-platform co-op at launch, despite leaning on Epic Games’ infrastructure for online play, and within cross-generation play, the base Xbox One and PlayStation 4 cannot host co-op, only join.
The most annoying point is that while level scaling is in effect, you can’t join a game where the progress is beyond your own character save. If you’re playing with friends, you better keep a save in lockstep with them or you’ll be repeating the same levels three times over. I get the desire from creators to keep the integrity of their narratives, but at the same time… this is a daft schlocky zombie basher. Pop up a warning, sure, but let us overrule that and play anyway.
