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Dead Island 2 is proof that sometimes just killing tons of zombies is still enough

5K View2023-04-19

I couldn’t blame anyone for feeling a bit of zombie fatigue. Even after a decades-long nonstop drip of movies, TV shows, comics, and games about the living dead, there’s always more in the pop culture pipeline. Last year saw the series finale of The Walking Dead after over twelve years on TV, but it has spin-offs in the works. Even if it didn’t, the TV adaptation of The Last of Us quickly blew up as the latest must-watch zombie sensation. And on the video game side, we’ve had indie zombie games like Stories from the Outbreak alongside triple-A fare like Capcom’s incredible remake of Resident Evil 4.

Love ’em or hate ’em, the undead just won’t stay down for long. I was pondering the reason zombies are such a consistent source of entertainment while I played through Dead Island 2 over the last weekend, and I think I reached a conclusion of sorts: Killing zombies is fun.

Okay, maybe this isn’t some stunning revelation, but that’s kind of the point of Dead Island 2. After being passed around to no less than four different developers across the span of nearly ten years, I half-expected a total disaster from this long-awaited sequel. What I got instead was a stripped-down, back-to-basics first-person zombie slasher/shooter that delivers lots of fast and furious fun without much fluff.

This sequel is set around a decade after the events of the first Dead Island, wherein a zombie outbreak spread like wildfire across the island of Banoi near Australia. Now the virus that turns dead humans into undead, gore-hungry cannibals has mysteriously traveled halfway around the world and ravaged Los Angeles and surrounding areas. Los Angeles is, notably, not an island, but in this world the government and military have apparently mobilized fast enough to quarantine the whole area and completely cut off access from the rest of the country to, well, stop the spread. Only in fiction, folks!

Dead Island 2 has six playable characters to choose between, such as Amy, an athletic L.A. native, a Shakespeare enthusiast from London who moved to Hollywood to become a stuntman. I went with Dani (pictured above), an Irish lass with a smart mouth and a punk rock aesthetic. Each of these characters has their own wealth of running commentary and dialogue to help make for a slightly different experience, but they all follow the same main quest: While attempting to escape the zombie-infested quarantine zone, your character makes the surprising discovery that they are actually immune to the virus. Now they have to figure out just why they’re so special and whether they can use that ability to help stop the outbreak, preferably while also finding a way out of Hell-A.

Seeing as the original Dead Island was semi-open world, and that game’s developers went on to make the fully open zombie games in the Dying Light series, I assumed that Dead Island 2 would present the L.A. setting as a big open world, with maybe some parts closed off until certain story beats. That is not the case, though. While there is some openness to the game, it’s actually not a real open-world experience at all. And this surprise is the first of Dead Island 2’s very wise choices.

See, instead of a massive open-world experience that asks players to aimlessly crawl around the world doing samey content for fifty or sixty hours, Dead Island 2 packs things up into a much more linear but much more tightly designed twenty hour campaign. It splits L.A. into ten distinct districts. Each of those zones operates as a very small open-world experience of its own, but even the biggest level in Dead Island 2 is a fraction of the size of any of the first game’s four maps.

Areas such as Bel-Air, Venice Beach, and Ocean Avenue have plenty of sidequests, collectibles, and similar content for those looking to pad out their playtime and get as much from Dead Island 2 as possible. I did a fair bit of extra stuff—my total play time was just under thirty hours—and it was all enjoyable enough and did a great job of offering worthwhile rewards, such as extra-powerful weapons and unique crafting recipes. But the main quest offers the best experiences in the game by making most of them play out like...well, like a much more traditional, linear first-person shooter.

With the reduced sense of scale, Dead Island 2 developer Dambuster Studios has focused more on providing handcrafted set pieces and brisk but interesting levels with an actual sense of momentum and pacing. It’s strange to think about level design as a lost art, but the open-world formula calls a lot of the attention of a game in a different direction; Dambuster Studios has pushed back, even if lightly, by creating a compelling experience that feels like it could have stepped out of one of the great single-player shooters of the mid-2000s or early 2010s. And while that could read as throwing shade to some, for me, it’s entirely a compliment.

For as much as I enjoyed the original Dead Island back in 2011, I can’t remember a single thing about its world full of near-identical resort buildings and shanty towns. But Dead Island 2 let me waltz through some very memorable areas, such as a movie studio lot full of goofy parody film sets, or a nightmare version of the Santa Monica Pier that culminates in a fight against a zombie clown who would fit right in alongside Pennywise. And yeah, sure, I also fought my way through some generic sewers, subway tunnels, and nondescript zombie research labs. Even those less exciting locations had their share of exciting moments.

Within those levels, most of my time was taken up bashing zombies in the head with a wide variety of melee weapons and then scrounging up crafting materials to repair and upgrade said weapons. From maces to Wolverine-style claws to samurai swords, Dead Island 2’s armory is overflowing with options, and all of them felt great and balanced in their trade-offs between power and speed.

Perhaps my biggest surprise, though, was the game's mastery of non-melee options. Guns were a rarity and rather an afterthought in the first Dead Island, but Dambuster Studios’s experience as a shooter developer is on display in the sequel. Pistols, rifles, and shotguns all provide excellent feedback and satisfying devastation, and to my surprise, guns became my preferred method for doling out damage. Ammo drops don’t come frequently enough to only use guns, but they’re also not rare enough that I felt annoyed or stuck doing close-quarters combat even when I didn’t want to.

Another brilliant addition to the zombie killing formula comes in the form of “curveballs.” In a game where ammo is rare and melee weapons break after extended use, curveballs offer a welcome break from the survival-lite tension. These thrown weapons—ranging from grenades to molotov cocktails to shuriken—are essentially infinite; they don’t need to be crafted or looted from boxes, and their usage is only limited by a timer that needs to refill. With the ability to equip two curveballs at any time and swap between them on the fly, I felt like I had a lot of flexibility in how I could approach each encounter against a pack of brain-munchers.

On top of picking out their preferred weapon and curveball loadout, Dead Island 2 players can also customize their experience through a series of unlockable perks, of which only a set number can be equipped at any one time. These essentially let you tailor the game to your own play style. If you prefer ranged combat, you can load up on perks that give damage boosts for hitting enemies from afar. If you’re obsessed with using the game’s fun sliding and jump kicks, go ahead and equip perks that provide stamina and health boosts when you pull them off. Some of the late-game perks do even more ridiculous stuff, like making zombies explode and do area damage to other baddies if you use certain moves or weapon types on them.

All of these small but smart mechanical additions really add up and lead to a shockingly fun and fresh-feeling time in Dead Island 2. From the outside, this looks like just another zombie game clone with little to offer, and again, if you’re burnt out on zombies, I don’t know that Dead Island 2 will convince you to feel otherwise. But I went in feeling jaded on the concept and came out the other end surprisingly energized.

This game doesn’t have a deep, emotional plot that will leave you in tears; it doesn’t have a grand open world that will fill you with awe; it doesn’t have some incredible new back-of-the-box mechanic that you’ve never seen before. Dead Island 2 is exactly what it says it is, without bells and whistles. But by forgoing all the ambitious stuff that could have made it appear to be something greater, the game has delivered on those core elements that make a game worth playing—most notably, fun.

Killing zombies is fun. Dead Island 2 lets you kill zombies. Ergo, Dead Island 2 is fun. Sometimes it really is that simple.

SCORE: 4 STARS OUT OF 5

PLAY IF YOU LIKE:

• Linear shooter campaigns. There are light open-world elements in Dead Island 2, but they’re very much downplayed. If you miss the days of a simple, straightforward shooter with actual hand-designed levels, give this one a shot.

• Zombies. Or, well, killing zombies. So I guess that’s hate actually. Play if you hate: zombies.

• Seeing the city and people of Los Angeles brought to their knees, finally forced to reckon with two centuries of being the modern Gomorrah. For real, though, Dead Island 2’s parody of the excesses of Hollywood could be a lot sharper than it is, but the game still does some fun stuff with its iconic setting and the eccentric weirdos who live there.

💬 Are you ready for an island (er, sorta?) getaway in Dead Island 2? Or will you be skipping this zombie has-been? Let me know what you’re thinking below!