Dead Island 2 is not the zombie-survival game that you’ve been waiting close to a decade for. Once thought to be a myth in video game circles that existed alongside the likes of Ubisoft’s Beyond Good & Evil sequel, Metroid Prime 4, and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, Dead Island 2 is finally here and ready to paint the town red with zombie entrails.

The original game, from Techland and Deep Silver, with its sun-soaked paradise gone to hell, was a trendsetter in the genre of open-world horror-action, a scenic sandbox filled with flesh-eating monsters. But in the years since then, throwing players to the proverbial infected wolves has become all the rage. We’ve seen a lot of zombie sandbox games pop up, but surprisingly, Dead Island 2 isn’t one of them. Not entirely, at least.

While it may have the trappings of a vast slice of residential evil to explore, Dead Island 2 is surprisingly much more linear in its design than you’d expect. It’s focused, has an infectious charm, and with a cast of cheeky zombie-slaying anti-heroes thrown into the mix, it’s a hard swerve into savagely satirical territory.

Dead Island 2 doesn’t waste any time once you clear the main menu. Within minutes of selecting a character to play as, you find yourself stranded in a version of Los Angeles that’s slightly worse than the regular metropolis, and you’re learning the ropes of rigor mortis trade. Unlike Dying Light 2’s massive sprawl of post-apocalyptic land or the desolate wilderness of Days Gone, Dead Island 2 swaps sandboxes for toyboxes. Each location is a smaller arena to travel around and slay in – small biomes that are cozy in design but never feel cramped.

For example, the starting level of Beverly Hills is a collection of walled-off homes for the rich and the famous. The Halperin Hotel is a multi-layered suite of ballrooms, acid pools, and devastated suites, and Venice Beach is a more open collection of sandy beaches and deserted storefronts. Each one of these locations are generously peppered with the infected hordes of brain-munching zombies, collectibles to find, and secret rooms that house some of the best loot in the game.

What makes these locations stand out, is that by going smaller, developer Dambuster Studios has managed to imbue them with a character that you’d typically not have the chance to appreciate. The disgusting sewers have art with an apocalyptic flavor on the walls, Santa Monica Pier is a festival of carnage, and my favorite example has to be the influencer house in Beverly Hills, which is a treasure trove of clickbait excess and fake apologies designed to win hearts and subscribers.

But a tour of Hell-A is only part of the appeal of Dead Island 2, as you’ll be busy caving in skulls and maiming zombies on your adventure. Gameplay-wise, all the usual tropes of the first-person zombie-survival genre are here. Hit hard, stay out of harm’s way, and use your feet to keep ankle-biting ghouls at bay.

Every character enhances this system with individual abilities and skills that play to their strengths. Jacob has the highest health of the group and he gets a small damage boost when he chains attacks; Carla receives a toughness boost when her health is low; and Ryan can regain health every time he knocks down a zombie. The key to maximizing the potential of each character lies in how you build them, as light-RPG elements reward you with stat boosts and skill cards to equip.

There are four main categories of skills–Abilities, Survivor, Slayer, and Numen– and these skill cards can be earned by leveling up, or finding them scattered around the game world. There are a total of 15 slots in the Skill Deck that you’ll gradually unlock as you level up, each one granting you special powers and abilities to help in combat. While some cards are specific to a slayer, most are applicable to all and you can swap them out at any time.

Level up, unlock more skill cards, equip the right ones to suit your playstyle, and you’ll quickly rise up the ranks in this hostile new world as you bounce between mobs of infected people.

The catch here is that you’ll never feel overpowered, as enemies level up with you and become deadlier as a result. There’s a give-and-take formula to Dead Island 2’s combat, one that favors lateral thinking and rewards you for dancing on the edge of danger. The more you use your skills, the better your odds when it comes to surviving the chaos around you, as you’ll need skills to pay the proverbial bills. Think of it this way: You’re always outnumbered, but you’ll seldom be outgunned.

That idea extends to your arsenal, as Dead Island 2 builds on the idea of MacGuyvered tools of destruction that’ll help chop the dead down to size. While your initial weapons are pure scrap that are only useful for inflicting moderate amounts of blunt force trauma, it’s not long before you start picking up more exotic blades and hammers on your path that can deal a decent amount of damage. Weapon durability, love it or hate it, plays a key part in keeping your arsenal fresh, as you’ll have to decide between scrapping weapons for resources, spending cash on fixing them up or making a lucrative deal with local traders.

But not every machete is equal, and the real charm lies in customizing your weapons at a workbench. After all, why settle for a regular baseball bat when you can strap a blowtorch to it and deal some fiery damage with it instead? Outfitting your weapons with pyro, shock, and other elements is a huge part of the gameplay loop, one that ties into using your environment as a weapon so that you can inflict maximum damage on zombies.

One great example which will please pyromaniacs is the abundant amount of oil staining the streets of LA, which represents a perfect opportunity to cook some zombies. Toss some bait near the deadly barrels, throw a Molotov cocktail in their hungry direction, and get ready for a barbeque that would make Hannibal Lecter salivate. Perfect.

The undead spanner in the works is that you’ll need to be mindful of which weapons you’re carrying, as not every zombie is built the same. Some of the walking dead don’t just have a tolerance to fire, they’ll actually generate flames of their own and use them to punch your face into medium-rare steak. Meanwhile, other enemies reveal themselves to beshock and acid-resistant. Knowing which tool to use at the right time for the right zombie is the key to success in Dead Island 2, and once you’ve found your groove, the game becomes a tense and gruesome experience.

If you’re getting tired of relying on human methods to combat the undead, then prepare to unleash your viral side on the mobs of flesh-eating monsters around you. A few hours into the game, you’ll be able to activate a Fury mode that allows you to rip and tear through zombies, quickly regenerating health in the process. This isn’t just a one-and-done gameplay mechanic either, as you can build on this powerful increase to your physical abilities by investing Autophage cards into your character.

The catch here, though, is that you’ll need to sacrifice some of your humanity to do so, as the three tiers of the Autophage system have some heavy requirements. While you’ll be able to do some incredible damage in Fury Mode, you’ll need to juggle your own survivability as the higher your reliance on it, the more drawbacks there are to being human.

While the melee combat is wonderfully on point, the same can’t be said for the gunplay in Dead Island 2. Sure, the idea of conserving ammo and only using guns when you really need to isn’t new to survival games, but in Dead Island 2, the gunplay feels incredibly stiff and ineffectual. Instead of being game-changers that can help save your skin at the eleventh hour, using a gun usually feels like a bad idea thanks to the janky controls that feel like they were ripped straight out of a PS2-era FPS.

On the plus side, guns don’t have a durability factor to consider, although there’s a further trade-off that ammo is hard to find and expensive to manufacture. Firearms can be modified in much the same way that melee weapons are; it’s just that using them doesn’t feel great or worth the risk in Dead Island 2.

Visually, Dead Island 2 is like watching an extreme autopsy in action. Dambuster Studios uses what it calls the FLESH system–or Fully Locational Evisceration System for Humanoids–to create disturbingly realistic zombies. These aren’t just your run-of-the-mill infected either, as doing damage to them results in a tangible difference to their appearance. In my time with the game, I’ve smashed the jaws off of zombies, watched them come at me with eyes dangling from their sockets like Newton’s cradle balls, and I almost gagged after my machete ripped through the muscles of a persistent animated corpse.

It is gruesome content, one that gives each zombie a feeling of mass and momentum as you hack away at them and see their organs explode out of their infected bodies. If you’re a real sicko, you can go to town on a corpse and revel in the carnage as you turn a former human into a Jackson Pollock painting.

Performance-wise, Dead Island 2 runs pretty decently. Dambuster has the game set to a 60 frames per second mode, and on PS5 where I played it, that performance remained consistent and stable. I’m no Digital Foundry so I’m not going to start waxing lyrical about checkerboard rendering and other technical stuff that’s way above my pay grade. Overall, it looks good enough, the characters have a surprising amount of emotive detail in their design, and every time I get up close to a zombie I feel like I’m about to lose my lunch. Not bad!

Where to buy Dead Island 2

The key takeaway with Dead Island 2, is that it doesn’t do anything that you haven’t seen before in a dozen other open-world zombie games. It’s a highlight reel of familiar systems and ideas, competently executed and glued together by a wonderful cast of misfits that you can turn into zombie-killing machines. It’s less ambitious than Dying Light 2 and its grand five-year plan for content, for example, but at the same time, having smaller stakes and biomes to explore allows for a game that focuses on being fun and impactful.

Almost a decade after we first got that iconic announce trailer back at E3 2014, followed by three studios working on the game, and numerous delays along the way, it’s a miracle that Dead Island 2 is here at all. It is, though, hungry, and ready to kick your door down so that it can eat your fleshy spare time.

Dead Island releases on 21 April for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.


Dead Island 2 review

Dead Island 2 doesn’t rewrite the rulebook of its gory genre, but it doesn’t need to either. It knows exactly what kind of game it wants to be, and if you set your expectations accordingly, you’ll find a charming throwback to 2011 that still does an excellent job at establishing its own identity.

 7.5
Dead Island 2 was reviewed on PS5