After Years In Development Hell 'Dead Island 2' Found Itself… In Itself

I fondly remember those days in 2011 playing the original Dead Island, slashing zombies in the oppressive heat of a crappy apartment above a corner store. A decade later, in less dirtbaggy environs, I’m smashing and slicing my way through zombie hordes again in Dead Island 2, and I can hardly believe how much I love it. 

I’m clearly not alone, as publisher Deep Silver and developer Dambuster Studios announced that the game sold over one million copies in its first three days post-release. This was far from a foregone conclusion. Dead Island 2 went through years of development hell of the kind that few games have survived intact. It was announced in 2014 with Yager Development attached to develop it. The game went through a total of 4 studios—including the original developer, now heading up the Dying Light games, Techland—before being handed to Dambuster, an in-house studio of the publisher. 

A dozen-or-so hours deep into the game, it’s clear that Dambuster did not want to mess too much with the formula that made Dead Island such a fan favorite. It’s shocking how similar 2 is to its forebearer in many ways. The basic gameplay loop of finding and upgrading increasingly powerful weapons, first-person melee zombie slaughter, story-gated open areas, and the irreverent tone are all left undisturbed. While some reviewers found this commitment to decade-old game design tropes interminably tedious and uninteresting, I found the game surprisingly refreshing. That’s because Dead Island 2 pulls from a genre of game that is today still something of a novelty: the immersive sim. 

Now, Dead Island 2 is not an immersive sim. Its developers call it an RPG. But the game is undeniably highly immersive because it pulls from that genre’s bag of tricks. It keeps things dead simple (killing zombies and finding keys is about all you do) but player expression is high. There are dependable interactive systems such as environmental hazards; for example, any random puddle of water can be turned into an electric trap with an electrified melee weapon or firearm. The player can, Itchy and Scratchy-like, gleefully pour out cans of gasoline to set alight. You can melt zombies with caustic chemicals, but you’d better have a jerry can of water handy nearby to douse it, because these hazards are dangerous for the player too. Your weapons break, and you have to repair them. This is, essentially, the entire game. Even the zombies themselves are sandboxes unto themselves—throw a weapon to puncture an explosive vest, drop kick them to a safe distance, perform a slide attack to slice off their legs, or keep things simple and take their head off with a magnum blast.

Some of this was in the original game’s DNA. Barrels and propane tanks could be thrown and blown up, weapons could be fitted with elemental damage mods and needed to be repaired, and zombies could even be drowned in Banoi’s clear waters. But the sequel takes this genetic code and mutates it into a new, if familiar, organism—opportunities for environmental traps and fuel to create them are absolutely everywhere. If there’s a locked mail truck, then of course the mailman has the key, and of course he’s a gross zombie shambling somewhere nearby now. The logic is clear, and it is good. 

Dead Island 2 breaks little new ground, hewing close to the original while exaggerating its best features and wisely pruning others (you could drive in the first game, but driving across an LA freeway between missions is the last thing I want to be doing). But in this, it highlights the playful immersiveness that made the original game such a well-remembered title, and why I can’t get enough of it today.