Dead Island 2 had to ‘start from scratch’ to deliver better carnage

digitaltrends.com:

In a shocking resurrection at Gamescom Opening Night Live 2022, Dead Island 2 came back from the dead. Despite having been in development for a decade, the version of the zombie action game coming in February has much fresher blood than what was teased in 2014. That’s because in 2018, development passed to a Deep Silver Dambuster Studios team that was content to start from scratch to create their own vision of the game.

“We thought it had loads of potential for characterful locations,” creative director James Worrall told me during an interview at Gamescom. “But when it came to the actual gameplay engine, what we really wanted to laser focus on was the up close and personal melee combat. There are guns in the game – gunsies are for funsies! – but it’s all about the melee combat … and to do that, we had to start from scratch.”

It was very apparent that this was an entirely new beast when I went hands-on with a 20-minute demo of the game at Gamescom. Rather than feeling like a 2014 game trapped in a 2022 body, Dead Island 2 is a modern action RPG that joyfully dishes out the most grotesque body horror it can think of.

Dead Island 2 takes players to a zombie-infested version of Los Angeles that’s three weeks into quarantine. Players choose one of six characters and then journey through the apocalyptic take on the city. The characters here aren’t exactly scared survivors hiding from monsters; in fact, they almost seem to be enjoying it a little too much.

This is almost like an origin story for a kind of superhero.

Tonally, it feels a bit like Sunset Overdrive, another apocalyptic zombie game that trades in tense horror for sandbox violence. Characters feel overpowered compared to zombies, clearing them out as if they were