Dead Island 2: It’s Alive! (and may not come to Germany)

There are games that have been in development for so long that you don’t really believe that you’ll actually be able to play them one day. After eight years that have passed since the announcement, heard Dead Island 2 definitely to this squad. We were all the more excited when an invitation from Deep Silver arrived in our mailbox in mid-July. Dead Island 2 is alive! And they not only want to show us a small sign of life of the game, but even let us play it ourselves. We didn’t need to be told twice, so we threw ourselves headfirst into an advanced demo version of the game. We encountered crazy weapons, nasty zombies and a lot of blood and intestines.

Unfortunately we are allowed to leave exactly nothing demonstrate. Although we were able to play an entire level of the game in detail and will also report about it, no screenshots or videos of the game were allowed.

Developer changes never bode well for a game. Most of the time, the new studio takes on a half-finished product that needs to be finished quickly. Dead Island 2 (buy now €69.99) will even have gone through three development studios when it was released and would therefore be predestined to become a patchwork à la Frankenstein’s Monster. But as a publisher, Deep Silver probably had the right feeling here. In an interview with the developers at Dambuster Studios, we were told that nothing was carried over from previous development cycles and that you could start from scratch.

You can see that in the project. With LA, a setting was chosen that was already in the announcement trailer

The story in Dead Island 2 is based on the pulp style, which walks the line between dead seriousness and trash.

Source: Deep Silver



of 2014 has been hinted at, but the game itself feels like it’s all of a piece. The City of Angels has been hit hard by the zombie virus outbreak. Public order has collapsed and the military has withdrawn. Any remaining and still living residents were left to fend for themselves.

For this struggle for survival, you choose one of six characters, which you control from the ego view. Each of them is infected but immune. It still has an impact on the protagonists, but we’ll get to that in a moment. If you want, you can also roam the deserted streets of Los Angeles with up to two friends in co-op. However, Dead Island 2 does not rely on an open world. As in the predecessor, you travel through larger but separate areas that you unlock as the story progresses.

Despite its name, Dead Island 2 leaves the island setting behind and sends you to Los Angeles.

Source: Deep Silver

However, you will not be put in the shoes of a fresh victim of the zombie apocalypse. All characters already have experience to make their way through the new order and are more or less tough dogs. Dead Island 2 shifts its tone more in the direction of pulp novels and 80s action flicks. Instead of crying, cynical jokes are spoken here when the next zombie horde appears in front of you. We’re more sitting in a slightly spooky zombie ghost train with a one-liner on the lips than in the naked struggle for survival.

That also fits the setting of our demo very much. Our job is to get a laptop. For this, the game sends us to the famous Santa Monica Pier. So we literally fight our way through a colorful amusement park, while zombies march towards us on the left and right and at the end there is even a nasty zombie clown waiting for us. But you should definitely not expect a wacky title in the style of Dead Rising 4. After the opening date, we would rather bet on Left 4 Dead as a template for the desired atmosphere in the game.