Review

Dead Island 2 Review - Eat The Rich

  • Coming Apr 21, 2023
    unreleased
  • XBSX
Mark Delaney on Google+

Dambuster Studios raises the dead in a vicious sequel long thought doomed.

Games labeled as being in "development hell" rarely release in a state anyone would want to experience--if they release at all. With Dead Island 2, however, Dambuster Studios kicks away a decade of dev hell problems like they’re a zombie lunging for its throat to deliver an undead RPG that is surely imperfect, but also enjoyable and even inventive.

Dead Island 2 is a first-person action-RPG set against the backdrop of the same zombie plague that caused mayhem in the original game's story. It moves the series away from its fictional island of Banoi and brings it to Los Angeles--which, you may recall, is definitely not an island. It's an odd move given the franchise's name, but a forgivable one once you begin to explore, as the semi-open world of the game's story and setting prove to be one of its greatest aspects.

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Now Playing: Dead Island 2 Review - Eat The Rich

None of the game's many locations are massive, but several of them are big enough, and regardless of its size, each zone is full of secrets, side quests, and plenty of reasons to stray from the main path. Dead Island 2 shirks a true sandbox-style open world in favor of smaller but more authored locales with far fewer repeating elements. It's ultimately a benefit to the game, as it tends to strike an engrossing balance between width and depth.

The game's world design relies on indirect routes. While exploring the pier, fences will cause you to duck through the arcade and past the bumper cars to get to the other end, creating new set pieces and keeping you zig-zagging through the unpredictable world. On the beach, storefronts are often explorable, rewarding you with great weapons, cash for upgrades, or other optional secrets. There are few straight paths through LA, and around every corner you'll find more monsters and the treasures they loom over. Backtracking is common, especially when tackling the game's 40+ side missions alongside its 24 main quests. Your first time through any zone, you won't be able to see and do everything, and the many locked doors you'll leave behind make retreading your steps a rewarding effort, as side quests open up new avenues consistently.

Getting through the world of "HELL-A" isn't just about walking the Venice Beach boardwalk or trekking down the lavish Beverly Hills. Chiefly, it's about bludgeoning, beheading, maiming, or otherwise decommissioning the countless zombies who get in your way. Dead Island 2 does an excellent job of evolving its first-person combat by way of both ample enemy and weapon variety, as well as a satisfying combat system that feels weighty and well-considered. I was still discovering new weapons even after I beat the main story, including some named weapons that represent the game's best loot available. Each weapon, be it a firefighter's axe, a wrench, a baseball bat, or one of many others, feels different, and the crafting system contains dozens of blueprints that can customize each weapon several times over, giving them familiar but still exciting status effects, as well as buffs to your chosen "Slayer" of the game's roster of six heroes.

With so much weapon variety, the zombies do well to match. The early distinction between walkers, runners, and shamblers doesn't take long to give way to hulk-like crushers, disorienting screamers, and much more. Dambuster stays true to the mythos of the original game by reintroducing many of the same classes of zombies, albeit now with more variety in their unique immunities, like electrified screamers who can't be killed with electricity since, well, that's already their whole deal. Even then, the game also introduces several new types of undead not previously seen in the series, too.

Even the game's narrower, more linear zones feel full of stories to uncover.
Even the game's narrower, more linear zones feel full of stories to uncover.

Adding weight and variety to the combat is great, but it's not really new to the genre. Dead Island 2's secret weapon is its highly detailed damage model--something Dambuster can hang its hat on. Every single enemy in the game exists like the world's grossest onion, with each layer able to be peeled away via katana, mallet, or anything else you'll equip.

Smash a zombie with a baton and the skull will crumble away to reveal the brain, or perhaps their jaw will hang loose like keys on a lanyard. Frying them to a crisp with electricity or melting away their skin with an in-universe sludge called Caustic-X will provide markedly different results. This makes it so not only do you need to consider how and where to inflict damage upon every single enemy in the game, but every slash, gash, and bash will be accounted for. It's unlike anything I've seen in a zombie game, and I've played dozens of them. I've never really been into gore for gore's sake, but even I'll admit that there's a special type of flair to punching a hole through the head of a zombie with homemade Wolverine claws that you just don't see in the genre very much, regardless of the medium.

Combining all of the exciting weapons with the highly varied hordes of zombies makes each encounter a conscious effort. Rarely is it the case where you can turn your brain off and bash through a collection of undead to get to an objective they're blocking. Each fight takes a concerted, thoughtful approach--and to my surprise, it stays tough all the way through.

All this praise is not without some caveats, however. For one, that difficulty can sometimes wade into feeling unfair. Enemies spawn quickly, and the game rarely lets you rest. In the game's two- or three-player co-op, this is usually fine, as you have helping hands, and it gives the world a sense of insecurity that a zombie plague should provide. But in single-player, some of the encounters, as well as the relentless enemy-spawning, may leave you feeling like you're swimming upstream in a river of blood and viscera. Sometimes a particular enemy will be the focus of your objective, and though the game does well to telegraph this, it can be tough to push through the horde to get to the one whose re-death will actually halt the horde from persisting.

Secondly, none of my praise for the game's melee combat can be applied to its gunplay. Guns start to crop up in the game about a third of the way through the story, and though there is also plenty of variety in these weapons--made deeper by player-driven customizations--guns are unwieldy and often feel like a liability. Oddly, they feel better to use when fired from the hip rather than aiming down their sights.There's a cumbersome unpredictability whenever the sight is used, which creates a discrepancy between where you were targeting from the hip and where you may then be targeting from the sight. It behaves like recoil that occurs before you've even fired a shot. This slows down gunplay as it means constantly re-lining up shots whenever you choose to aim in the first place, and though that should at least mean the shotguns of the world are fine since they hardly require aiming, they always felt underpowered.

Melee combat and gunplay represent the game's best and worst parts, respectively.
Melee combat and gunplay represent the game's best and worst parts, respectively.

The game's best gun, the hunting rifle, was my go-to when I felt like I had to use any firearms, but even then I'd just try to line up headshots from the hip, knowing that aiming more than that would likely just cause me to waste ammo. Still, you can feasibly beat the game using few to no guns at all, and you may be better off for it.

Exploration, combat, and upgrades all shine, which is helpful when the story is so forgettable. Though the sequel is written by a different team than the original, Dead Island 2's writing suffers from problems that tie them together like a familiar bouquet of unexplained motivations, grating dialogue, and a bad final act that races past a would-be charming level of campiness and crashes into groan-inducing territory.

I would be hard-pressed to name nearly any character other than my selected hero, Amy, or Sam B., who reprises his role from the first game. A fictional actor named Emma Jaunt plays a central part, too, and a shadowy legion of anti-heroes routinely pops up to mime narrative intrigue, but none of it amounts to anything.

The spirit of the story is fun in a Grand Theft Auto sort of way, in that it targets, above all others, rich American socialites as the butt of its jokes. Though some of these characters are made out to be good people, the writing often revels in sending zombie teeth barreling for the jugulars of streamers, actors, and others deemed to be the vapid wealthy elite. But this is merely the air of storytelling. It lets the world feel lived in, and it actually makes some of the many collectibles enjoyable to read, but whenever cutscenes would threaten to tell a story, I found myself groaning like the undead.

For a game in development for more than a decade, it's a minor miracle for Dead Island 2 to come out at all. The fact that it's arrived in such a state that players can have fun with it for the duration of its story and beyond--even as that story itself is an afterthought--is a testament to the team that got it to a once-unlikely finish line. Along with the lackluster story, poor gunplay and some balancing issues hurt Dead Island 2, but its deep melee combat systems and rich setting make it a better game than the original, which is maybe the most important thing I can say about it after everything it's been through.

Mark Delaney on Google+
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The Good

  • Constantly evolving combat
  • Unique damage model that bludgeons and shreds zombies with incredible detail
  • Exploration is fun and the semi-open world feels full of secrets worth finding

The Bad

  • Story is forgettable and characters are often grating
  • Enemy spawn rates sometimes feel unbalanced for solo play
  • Bad gunplay

About the Author

Mark explored Dead Island 2's Los Angeles, which is notably not an island, for approximately 30 hours on Xbox Series X. A review code was provided by the publisher.
44 Comments  RefreshSorted By 
GameSpot has a zero tolerance policy when it comes to toxic conduct in comments. Any abusive, racist, sexist, threatening, bullying, vulgar, and otherwise objectionable behavior will result in moderation and/or account termination. Please keep your discussion civil.

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salty101

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That was a surprisingly informative review. I kinda lost faith in this site years ago, might take another look around cuz this review.

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hardwenzen

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Probably a good game just like the first one.

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Tiwill44

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About what you'd expect. It'll probably be worth it when it comes to Steam and drops to 15 bucks in a few years.

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Barighm

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Frankly, it sounds exactly like the first game. Which is fine.

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xgalacticax

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Story should not be a factor on which the game is judged in any way. The developers did not set out to make Citizen Kane. Bad gunplay - fair enough.

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HAWK9600

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@xgalacticax: That's kinda like saying people shouldn't have judged Forspoken for its story and characters, though. . .

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Akriel_Boulve

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@xgalacticax: It absolutely SHOULD be a metric to judge a game. If they don't care about story then they should do something like the original Doom or Wolfenstein and basically give you NO STORY, because no story is better than a terrible story.

Whether you like it or not, Story informs gameplay, I mean just look at what happened with the Saints Row remake. The biggest complaint people had was that the characters and their story were not a Saints Row story. The original Saints Row series was also decidedly not trying to be Citizen Kane, but they embraced their cheesy weird over the top story and ran with it and it's arguably what made those games so great, despite being a GTA clone.

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mogan

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mogan  Moderator

@xgalacticax: It's part of the game, man. The writers may not have set out to make Citizen Kane, but if what they did make hurts the experience of playing the game, it should knock the score down.

6 • 
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markdelaney

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markdelaney  Staff

@johndoe12345: It's on this website.

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naryanrobinson

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“Bad gunplay” seems like... a pretty big one...

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salty101

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Edited By salty101

@naryanrobinson: Maybe but my guess it's like Dying Light (1). Just tacked on, never meant to be a focus.

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Reuwsaat

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gunplay killed it for me in the first game, going melee and drop-kicking zombies never got old, but once guns came into play, melee just felt stupid, character's special attacks had nothing on guns, and the gunplay wasn't great either, so it's kind of a positive to me that it isn't worth it in this game IMO

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illegal_peanut

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We waited 8 years for a 7/10?

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deicerniauskas

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Edited By deicerniauskas

@illegal_peanut: I did not 8 eight for this game nor for the 7/10

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Akriel_Boulve

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@illegal_peanut: I mean not really...they made the Dying Light series which is in the same universe, and basically plays the same in most ways...

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Kaki

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@illegal_peanut: We did it well for Cyberpunk 2077, so why not with this one?

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StickEmUp

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Edited By StickEmUp

@illegal_peanut: I have no idea how anyone could’ve expected anything more. The first one was a 7. Nothing leading up to this point suggested anything more for this one.

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salty101

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@stickemup: I wish I had heard that about the first before I spent time in the def. edition trying to figure out all the praise it got.

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RestatBonfire

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@illegal_peanut: this is the same website that gave alien isolation a 6

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ID0ntKn0w7

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@restatbonfire: after a good long while trying to figure out how to strategize my way through Alien Isolation, I did some reading and found out (from the horse's mouth) that this game has Mario Kart-style rubberbanding, meaning when you start to succeed it sends the alien directly to your position to eat your face.

Alien Isolation deserved a 6

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faithxvoid

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I liked the first one, but stopped caring about this one because I just don’t need another 40-hour-of-side-quests open world game. Very happy this is more linear. I will probably check it out!

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NilsDoen

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HMMMMMM feels gamepass. is it gamepass?

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mogan

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mogan  Moderator

@nilsdoen: I don't think it is. At least not yet. You're right, this very much looks like a game I would try if it was on a service I already paid for, but there are too many new games I'm interested in to drop $60-70 on all of them.

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TheCupidStunts

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Good review, it told me a lot of the things I wanted to know. I'll probably hold off for now what with Jedi Survivor dropping the following week.

Hope everyone enjoys it! 😺

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Barighm

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@thecupidstunts: He doesn't say anything about the depth of the customization or player skills though. Do we have the same skill trees as the previous game. Are they balanced? Do they matter? Do we need to do side quests to unlock all the best blueprints again or can we find them? Are we talking fetch questy style quests or did they improve them? Are the murder rooms back?

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TheCupidStunts

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@Barighm: It spoke to the things that I was wondering about anyway. The aggressive respawn rate is a huge turnoff for me, so I'm glad it was discussed.

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Gifford38

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Edited By Gifford38

wish they made this game for psvr2.

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chriss_m

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Edited By chriss_m

I'll never forget Mark Delaney's Twitter rants justifying that publication that gave Hogwarts Legacy a 1 star review, which was packed with bias, errors and personal animosity toward the creators of the game. Delaney explained that reviewers have different feelings and they're all equally valid! Which obviously shows he has absolutely no understanding of what the art of critique actually is - which is problematic because it's his full time job. I could go on about general lack of quality in gaming blogging, nepotism, etc, but I'll leave it there.

Anyway, since that Twitter rant, I've been completely unable to take him seriously, so every time I see him pop up as the reviewer of whatever, I just need to groan and find another publication.

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illegal_peanut

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Edited By illegal_peanut

@chriss_m: Reviewing a product is one thing. Bashing it because of personal opinions on what someone said (Which fun fact: She never had a negative opinion on trans people. There is literally no evidence anywhere.) is a totally different thing.

At least for example D. Trump. When people bashed him for being Sexist, Racist, insensitive, Anti-American, and a bad businessman. At least you can find an article, image, or better yet a video of him saying/doing that. With the whole Harry Potter thing. I couldn't find a single video or tweet showing that the maker of harry potter hated trans people.

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ID0ntKn0w7

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@illegal_peanut: true, and though she did engage with some of the same irrational fear that plagues both the everything-is-transphobic crowd and the trans-people-are-coming-for-our-children crowd, she consumed it in a great deal more moderation than most, and has consistently shown more nuance and thoughtfulness in her opinions than most. But people are really committed to their narrative, so they're happy to call this rape survivor an evil b*tch.

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Barighm

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Edited By Barighm

@chriss_m: So why are you here? If you hate the site so much and turn away when you see its authors, why come back?

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chriss_m

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Edited By chriss_m
@Barighm said:

@chriss_m: So why are you here? If you hate the site so much and turn away when you see its authors, why come back?

It’s purely habit. I don’t hate this place as much as I hate Kotaku, for example. So not enough to outright boycott it. But enough to make my dislike of most of its writers known in the, absolutely vain, hope that they implement some sort of editorial standards at some point.

If the site wasn’t in my tabs window when I launch my browser, I’d probably be significantly less likely to come here. Habit is what keeps a lot of these sites alive.

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markdelaney

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markdelaney  Staff

@chriss_m: I'm unforgettable, you say? Wow, high praise. Thanks for reading!

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Barighm

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Edited By Barighm

@markdelaney: Maybe it's because I have sense of dignity, or because I took journalism courses taught by actual career journalists and wrote for my college newspaper, but I wouldn't be making smart alecky remarks if I was part of a team responsible for reducing a news site's viewership and reputation to crap status. Frankly, I consider goading readers who bring forth legit criticisms as childish.

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markdelaney

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markdelaney  Staff

@Barighm: You're in the comments every day.

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chriss_m

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Edited By chriss_m

@markdelaney said:

@Barighm: You're in the comments every day.

This is a funny retort. As long as you understand that your whole purpose, your whole job, is getting people to click on this website and put eyes on ads to make your corporate overlords money, that is.

If you’re under the illusion that you’re contributing to the wider culture, or that you’re informing readers, or that you’re inspiring provocative but intellectually stimulating conversation, or that you’re in some way influencing the direction of gaming then it would be less funny. In that case, It would really be more of a sad sort of admission that despite your delusions of having any sort of meaning, you really know deep down that your raison d’etre is getting them clicks.

Indeed, if I was asked to define your job, I’d say you were basically a glorified sign spinner.

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MigGui

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Edited By MigGui

@markdelaney: I've logged in just to upvote this HAHAHA

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sncyriac

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@chriss_m: To be fair, games should be reviewed for whether they are conservative or liberal, not for their gameplay.

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Barighm

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@sncyriac: Cute troll, but ChrisM doesn't seem to reply to anyone anymore, so don't bother.

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chriss_m

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Edited By chriss_m

@Barighm said:

@sncyriac: Cute troll, but ChrisM doesn't seem to reply to anyone anymore, so don't bother.

I do still respond. It’s just after wasting a lot of time on pointless arguments I’ve tried to be more selective about what arguments I get embroiled in.

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GirlUSoCrazy

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Thanks for the review!

3 •