Dead Island 2 is as mindless as its zombies

Dead Island 2 is a game lost in time. Over the course of a decade, its development has fallen to a trio of different studios, each trying to create a sequel to a more cooperative zombie fighting game from 2011. In the meantime, Dead Island’s original developer, Techland, has moved on to bigger and bigger games. better things with its Dying Light series. Delivered by Nottingham’s Dambuster Studios, the final result of this fraught process can sometimes feel like an old friend.

Dead Island 2The caustic tone and dated systems evoke a strange nostalgia for the silly, straightforward, but more first-person action games that dominated the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 era. It’s a relic that’s rough around the edges, but the linearity feels refreshing, and the bloody combat makes for a constant, visceral spectacle. Most importantly, it’s not another death march with a checklist. If, like me, you’ve developed a penchant for brevity over the past few years, you’ll be pleased to hear that you can beat this game in a reasonable amount of time.

You play as one of six “slayers” who handily converge on the last flight out of a quarantined Hell-A, Dambuster’s beefy pastiche of Los Angeles. Unfortunately, the infection spreads on board, the plane crashes, and in the ensuing chaos, you discover you’re immune. An insufferable movie star invites you to their McMansion in Beverly Hills to regroup, and you make your way through the City of Angels to (hopefully) be part of the cure.

I chose Dani, a rockabilly mosher from Cork, Ireland whose cheesy jokes kept me company during the predictable campaign. Each killer has innate abilities and statistical differences, but you still follow the same storylines no matter who you choose. Dani’s explosive melee attacks sold me though, as they go well with it Dead Island 2‘s most notable feature: the disgustingly convoluted procedural gore system.

Repeated attacks break through skin, muscle, fat and bone, making zombie bodies feel like meat piñatas, with accidental dismemberments galore. Eyeballs hang gracefully from their sockets and jaws swing loose as fearless zombies shuffle toward you, their charred skin giving way to slimy blood. The pure anatomical extravaganza of Dead Island 2 is a compelling reason to play, and the most progressive feature. I wish there was a better game to wrap it around.

The old-fashioned approach to first-person melee combat feels both lethargic and frustrating here. I constantly felt like I was overextending my attacks and taking slow animations into account, with the stiff right-stick camera quickly becoming the bane of my existence. This hurts when there’s so much fun to be had in finally landing a dropkick and kicking a zombie’s head away from a garage door in slow-mo. The slapstick chaos of the controls feels like a step backwards compared to Dead IslandThe agile and articulate attack system that allows you to get into a murderous stream and adequately defend yourself.

Image: Dambuster Studios/Deep Silver

Part of the problem is the new skill card system, which is replacing Dead Islandthe skill trees. The top row of slots lets you choose between skills like dodging or blocking (which seems ridiculous, for such basic mechanics), and the rest offer insignificant stat buffs that you can’t really pinpoint in combat. As a result, it is difficult to specialize in a meaningful way. This amounts to some concrete boots as far as co-op is concerned.

One of my favorite things about Dead Island was the ability to have expertise in a specific area, such as firearms or edged weapons. This made for memorable moments where you could use the skills you developed to fill the gaps in your teammates’ respective skills. Dead Island 2The game’s lackluster skill system strips away the character-building appeal that the first game so skillfully accomplished. As the credits rolled, I felt aimless and didn’t know how to improve my character beyond playing “zombie slots” with its randomized loot system.

Fortunately, in the precincts of this digital Los Angeles there are some fun side missions that counteract the more formal main missions where you race between cutscenes. One had me beating the zombified World’s Strongest Man competitors in Venice Beach, while another sent me to the saltiest dives of the Santa Monica pier in pursuit of a delusional food critic. Unfortunately, many side quests end with the focal NPC unpleasantly turning into a zombie, as there aren’t many verbs here beyond “kill.”

But if you can avoid the frequent interruptions of his hulking, brain-dead brutes, you’ll find out Dead Island 2 does a lot with its small, linear spaces. I was often surprised by the stories about the environment. In the TV station, a ‘breaking news’ ticker serves as an SOS, and in the movie studio, you fight your way through themed lots, complete with costumed zombies and interactive traps. Hell-A’s playful paraphernalia add to this strong sense of place. Protein bars, light beer bottles and framed slogans referencing American exceptionalism lie in the abandoned garages of Beverly Hills. A run-down hype house has neon streaming setups and an apology script that reads “CRY HERE FOR SYMPATHY”.

Image: Dambuster Studios/Deep Silver

The game’s writing is full of cynical jokes about this funny future for humanity, but it’d be hard to call it good satire as it doesn’t really envision anything else. A quick editing style, cutscene glitches, and being able to create muted facial animations Dead Island 2‘s worst lines stick out, leading to some wooden readings and back-and-forth dialogue that often felt like it was stepping over itself. The game’s optional audio journals almost always include an obnoxious denial of the apocalypse, which gets old quickly, as do the heavy-handed references to internet culture, which arrive at a mile a minute. “Slam that like button like a bae when their parents aren’t home,” says a sleuth, as you kill zombies in free ways to create a viral video.

There is an overwhelming fakeness and irony in it Dead Island 2 that, without any oppositional hope or sincerity, can ultimately make the experience of playing it feel like a downer of sorts, similar to the feeling you get after eating a ton of junk food. My partner turned to me during one of my sessions late in the game and said it seemed like I was on autopilot. Instead of engaging meaningfully with its systems, I mindlessly pushed through the hordes in search of more complexity, or a satisfying narrative crescendo that never came. Dead Island 2‘s nostalgic charms can take you back to a simpler time, but there’s often a reason why you don’t see old friends anymore.

Dead Island 2 will be released on April 21st on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One and Xbox Series X. The game has been reviewed on PS5 using a pre-release download code from Deep Silver. Vox Media has partnerships. These do not affect editorial content, although Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased through affiliate links. You can find additional information on Polygon’s Ethics Policy here.