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Dead Island 2 review: as disposably entertaining as an electrified pipe-wrenchMenace beach
Menace beach
To pre-empt your first question, no,Dead Island 2was not worth waiting eleven years for. In its defence, however, few things are. If George Romero had taken over a decade to make Night Of The Living Dead, the fact it takes place largely in a basement would look less like canny guerrilla filmmaking and more like staggering incompetence. It only took NASA eight years to put men on the moon from the point they started trying, which puts the value of many inhibited projects (like my folder of unfinished novels) into depressingly sharp relief.
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Choosing LA as its setting is probably the smartest thing Dead Island 2 does. The game has visible fun playing with its unique culture and social strata, particularly in its first half. You’ll encounter pampered celebrities struggling to accept their sudden irrelevance, weaselly hangers-on trying to prove their worth to their fallen idols, wannabe influencers seeking to exploit the carnage for clicks, and aging rockstars so hopped up on booze and drugs that the end of the world barely registers. All this is portrayed through a consistently obnoxious and intermittently humorous script, and intensely cinematic first-person cutscenes that rivalCyberpunk 2077in quality.
My feelings quickly changed once I’d unlocked two features. First was the dropkick, a supremely silly risk-reward manoeuvre that lets you slam your boots into the chest of a zombie to send them flying, but also leaves you lying on the floor and therefore vulnerable to attack. Second was the golf club, the first melee weapon I properly clicked with. There’s something particularly satisfying about the way itthwacksinto a zombie’s mush, and while there are tons of more exotic death implements scattered around LA, I always kept a nine-iron stuffed in my back pocket.
It should be noted all of this isastoundinglyviolent. Dead Island 2 really dwells on the interaction between hazardous implements and the human body. The fact you can chop off limbs in this game is almost quaint, considering you can whack a zombie’s jaw off with a police baton, or sink a claw hammer into its skull so its eyes pop out, or cover them with caustic alkali and watch them melt like that lad from Robocop in real time. It truly is Verhoeven levels of gratuitous, and if there’s anything in this game I’d believe took eleven years to make, it’s the way the undead fall apart in response your attacks.
But then you’re back to punching your whole arm through a zombie’s face using reinforced knuckledusters. And to be perfectly honest, Dead Island 2 is better for it. This is a game that that understands its own entirely disposable nature, that knows it’s landing at the tail end of overwhelming zombie survival fatigue. Instead of trying to resist that, it embraces it, resulting in a breezy, messy adventure that has zero nutritional value, but will fill your bloodstream with yummy, delicious sugar. Dead Island 2 is a stinky trash game, and this filthy racoon had a grand old time rolling around in it.
