Dead Island 2 Hands-On Preview
I’ve played Dead Island 2. That’s an odd sentence to write in 2022. First announced back in 2014 with its now-infamous trailer featuring a zombified runner, we’ve seen next to nothing of the game since. The almost decade-long radio silence likely had most people believing that Dead Island 2 was, well, dead.
Until now. I’ve played Dead Island 2. A whole 20 minutes of it. It’s real. It’s genuinely planned to be released in 2023. And, from what I can tell, I think it’s got the potential to please a lot of Dead Island fans.
Despite a long absence, Dead Island 2 is still what it originally set out to be: an open-world, co-op, California-set sequel to Techland’s well-received (if incredibly shonky) original. While that vision was first put together by Yager Development, and then passed onto Sackboy: A Big Adventure creator Sumo Digital, Dead Island 2 is now in the hands of Dambuster Studios, the folks behind Homefront: The Revolution. Rather than continuing its predecessors’ work, Dambuster has built a new version of Dead Island 2 entirely from scratch. Despite all this, that sun-soaked, humorous, pulpy vision from the original trailer remains. In fact, much of what I’ve played looks reasonably similar to the gameplay we saw of the original version, but with a few modern upgrades.
The short demonstration puts me in control of Amy, one of six different playable characters. The final version will support three-player co-op, for now I’m stuck solo in what Dambuster affectionately calls ‘Hell A’; a bright and bizarre Los Angeles that’s been devastated by a recent zombie outbreak. At this mid-point in the campaign, I’m on a beach searching for a laptop containing a ‘Blood Drive’ for plot reasons that I’m sure will make more sense
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