Dead Island 2 Review: Art of the Dead

Dead Island 2 is far from a perfect game, but given everything it took to get it here, it's damn near close to a miracle that it turned out as good as it did. It's pretty difficult to make a zombie game that feels like it has something new to offer after all of these years, but Dead Island 2 largely manages to succeed. After a zombie virus tears Los Angeles apart, a bunch of otherwise ordinary citizens are left stranded and forced to find their own way out of the blood-soaked streets of sunny California. You play as one of six different selectable characters (though this doesn't seem to directly impact the story) and seemingly immune to the virus, making you a potential candidate for a vaccine. It's up to you to figure out how to get out of this apocalyptic hellhole and also possibly stop this infection from destroying all of humanity.

In some ways, Dead Island 2 feels like the natural evolution of the first-person zombie slaying RPG after having time to take notes on what worked for not only its predecessors, but also the two Dying Light games. While you won't see much innovation when it comes to traversal, the combat is consistently a total joy. The most important part of a zombie game is to make sure the violence is wildly fun and that is absolutely the case here. You have guns, swords, drop kicks, golf clubs, bombs, and so many other tools at your disposal to paint the City of Angels unrecognizably red.

Dead Island 2 really empowers you by allowing you to feel strategic with how you fight. One of the most immediately obvious ways it reveals this is by showing how you can target various parts of a zombie to take them down. If you repeatedly strike their legs, they'll start to break, and the bones will stick out like a violently injured athlete which will slow them down. Keep wailing on them or use a sharper weapon and they'll eventually come clean off, forcing the zombie to crawl. The same goes for their arms and, of course, the head. If you bash a zombie's head in enough times, you'll also see their face become more and more disfigured until it's literally skeletal. They're essentially blood-filled pinatas and you're the kid with the flaming baseball bat trying to bust them open. 

The level of gore in Dead Island 2 probably isn't for the squeamish, but it is deeply satisfying to feel like you are having a serious impact on these cannibalistic monsters that are ending the world as we know it. While zombies do have a health bar, you have a more clear and understandable visual indicator in front of you when you see that the police baton you just picked up caused the zombie's jaw to dangle from its face like a bony punching speed bag.

It's all about how you fight in Dead Island 2. You can block a zombie's attacks to perform a swift counter attack with comical finishing animations, set the fuse on a zombie with grenades on its chest and then drop kick them into a larger crowd for a big chain reaction, or get extra creative with your surroundings. The car next to you may have a battery under its hood. You can pop it open, steal the battery, and then kick open the nearby fire hydrant. From there, throw some meat into the water to attract the horde, then throw the battery into the big puddle of water, and voila, you have a bunch of freshly-fried zombies. You can even throw little bombs of fluid at zombies, ensuring they get properly soaked, and then electrify them from there if there's no nearby hydrants.

This type of stuff never really stops either. New zombie variants, weapons, and opportunities are constantly being introduced throughout the story to keep the action feeling fresh. It's a game that rewards creativity in combat as opposed to having you mindlessly hack and slash or shoot every zombie you see for 20+ hours. It's rewarding, engaging, and most importantly, a hell of a lot of fun.

Unfortunately, the game takes a bit of a step back when it comes to managing these very fun weapons. In addition to the annoyance of having to constantly repair your weapons at workbenches, you will also have to frequently dump money into making sure your weapons match your level so they don't become irrelevant and weak. Either that or abandon the weapons you've spent precious resources into beefing up for new ones you've found on the sidewalk or in the trunk of someone's car.

The upgrades themselves are also a little too basic. You can make your weapon do electricity or fire damage, make them a bit more durable or swing faster, and so on. It's not exactly mind-blowing stuff, it's generally pretty been there, done that for a zombie game. A series like Dead Rising always found a way to break out of this trap by creating absolutely absurd, but creative weapons like double-sided chainsaws, electrified wheelchairs to push zombies around in, and so on.

While I am not asking Dead Island 2 to copy Dead Rising, I am saying there are more to weapons in these types of games than just fire and electric swords. There are ways to think outside the box and make the weapons themselves feel unique, innovative, and different from each other.

However, in other ways, it is clear Dead Island 2 is perpetually stuck in the early 2010s. The level design somehow feels like a step back from the first game. Despite the title of the game, there is no longer a great big island to explore or cars to conveniently maneuver around said island. Instead, you're herded through zones which are typically just a very tightly designed, linear-ish neighborhood or a layered property like a hotel. I wouldn't call this an open-world game even though there is some room to explore – it feels more like a contained world. 

It's small, but densely detailed in many cases. When in the Hollywood Hills, there are a lot of mansions that tell their own story. One of the homes in the starting area is a content house, filled with content creator accolades parodying things like YouTube subscriber milestones and such. If you dig even further, you'll find a room with a whiteboard that has a script for the classic YouTuber apology, the type where they sit down in front of the camera, let out a heavy sigh, and then tell you all about how them doing some absurdly heinous thing was just an honest mistake and they're truly sorry. It's a truly hilarious form of satire and there's lots of this stuff all over the place, but all of this detail does come at the cost of a larger playspace.

For some, that's a win because it means less of a vapid open world that goes on for miles and miles without much substance. For others, that may hurt the replayability of the game which is something Dead Island and its spiritual successor, Dying Light, have always benefited from thanks to being co-op games. It's hurt more by the fact that not all of these areas are as detailed, some of these zones are merely there just for the story and there's no real reason to linger or explore. 

This also feels a bit frustrating given Los Angeles is such a rich, expansive setting with tons of different aesthetics and cultures. Instead, it feels like the game is limiting itself to a couple of neighborhoods that just loosely scratch the surface of what this town actually is for most of the game. You do get to visit some places like a movie studio backlot, but it's once again pretty linear. Imagine slicing and dicing zombies on the Walk of Fame or an abandoned red carpet movie premiere that had to be evacuated when the outbreak began. It's a joyful mental image, but it's not something we really get to see here in this game.

Zombie stories are often defined by their settings. Dawn of the Dead and Dead Rising are iconic in part because of the fact they take place in a mall. Train to Busan kicks ass because… well it takes place mostly on a train. Zombieland has an awesome finale at an amusement park. Zombie stories give you an excuse to take some of the most ordinary, everyday places or recognizable landmarks and turn them into glorious killhouse for the undead. Dead Island 2 doesn't quite take full advantage of its own prospects.

Dead Island 2 may not always make full use of its promising setting, but it may be the most fun I've had killing zombies in quite some time. The combat is deliriously fulfilling and will likely be further heightened in co-op when players can ping-pong zombies off of each other with their drop kicks or whatever other hijinks the community can come up with. It's an artful display of zombie violence and mayhem, which is an achievement in of itself given how saturated this genre is this many years after the first Dead Island.

Rating: 3.5/5

Dead Island 2 will release on April 21st for Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PS4, PS5, and PC. A review code for Xbox Series X was provided by the publisher for the purposes of this review.