Dead Island 2 looks... good?

 Well I'll be...

Wait, no- you can't do this to me. I literally wrote an extended blog about the inescapable dangers of Development Hell the other day, and here comes a game I was absolutely certain would be a gorey and bile-strewn victim of that ravenous death hound but here we are- I may have to eat crow. And you know what- a game that looks wildly better than my meagre expectations is always a great turn of circumstance very much worth celebrating, especially when we're talking about a sequel to a game 'franchise' I was done with before the first game finished. A sequel who's gameplay reveal had ended up blowing my socks clean off with the kind of detail and attention you'd never expect from a video game currently on it's third development reboot! Deep Silver passed this game off more than an unloved child between relatives, but it seems Uncle Dambuster is the golden foster here to bring the best out of the ugly duckling and turn it into a truly gruesome goose- and frankly, I'm wildly impressed.

Given the amount of generalised improvements we've seen make their way into this higher tier of zombie game, I shouldn't be quiet as impressed as I am everytime I've seen a 'flesh and blood' system-but I can't help it, I don't know when these systems are going to start to grow old but they sure aren't there for me yet. I still gawp with grim fascination when I see Resident Evil 2 Remake's dynamic gore system which built flesh ontop of a skeleton so that bullet defamation worked exactly as it should on the zombies. Dead Space Remake had a very similar innovation with how it's Necromorphs were built, which worked particularly well with that game's focus on mechanically coherent dismemberment. Now we have Dead Island 2 bringing it's own take on these same systems which look to be fitted with some extra pizzazz features like the ability to break jaws clean off, or smash the face plate off a monster in a special uppercut move. It's gruesome in all the greatest ways a zombie game can be.

When Dead Island 2 was first announced all those years ago, (verging on ten if I recall) it was just going to be a lukewarm expansion on what the first game and Riptide had offered with the only real innovation being the larger setting of LA. Which itself would have been something of a misleadingly sweet fruit, because anyone who has played this series before knows that these games haven't exactly been the best when it comes to properly exploring their settings. The first act of the first game was fine, seeing the huts of the resort, but then we were sent to a packed city which led us through cramped alleyways and trudging down ugly sewers, or a jungle that felt more like a half-baked maze level with the walls swapped for tropical trees. I actually don't know how long Dambuster have been working on this current iteration of the game, but it seems they haven't veered too far away from that 'directed and linear' formula; which means that if this game cannot rely on an 'open world exploration' gimmick to sell it's units (Dying Light pretty deftly nicked that crown anyway) then it would have to the moment-to-moment gameplay that makes Dead Island stick out.

From the recent gameplay it really seems that the team have buckled down and really gone to task with finetuning that part of the experience, creating not only an array of killing implements but imbuing them with collaborative effects that can work off the environment, (i.e. electrocuting water, setting fire to oil trails, blowing up gas canisters) another gameplay ideal I love in modern gaming which goes overlooked so very often. It feels as though Dead Island 2 wants to capture the crown of the game where it's fun to jump about as a murder hurricane and slice through zombies in the most creatively in-your-face manner as possible; a status-quo which I think can grow stale quickly without an abundance of variety to combat, or a reason to stick around for the world and narrative that immerses you in the grim task.

Dead Island 1 famously suffered from huge tone issues thanks to one trailer for which the marketing team went absolutely nuts and decided to film a heart-wrenching family tragedy in slow motion reverse shots; totally adverse to the happy-go-lucky crush-a-monster-with-a-tennis-racket nature of the game in question. The tone of the built game was supposed to be like Dead Rising, but what we ended up seeing was a Walking Dead drama with piano music and dramatic slow-mo for effect! This wouldn't have been such a problem if that trailer didn't then go viral, which resulted in the development team getting an order from the head office to retrofit their almost finished game into being more like that dramatically wrenching trailer. It's hard to say exactly what effect that late-game change in tone had, but I can only assume that certain tonally bizarre plot shifts, like what happens to Jin after she gets kidnapped by the gang, came as a result of the darker splash atop the completed narrative.

But I have to be honest, unlike one of those pearl-clutching fainters who write for a lot of the games review outlets online, I actually cherish and applaud games when they break across the barrier of the comfortable to address topics you'd never have expected. The Voerman Sisters from Vampire the Masquerade are iconic and not just because Jeanette dresses like that. (Or because Grey Griffin voice them, although her performances are always iconic.) They are a perfect representation of the World of Darkness because of their horrifically twisted origin story that is born within the forgotten and discarded of society, and scars itself onto your psyche painting the sort of broken people who can expect to meet throughout the world of VTMB. I don't think Dead Island ever got that dark with it's story, but they flirted with that direction and I really liked that daring. In combination with the silly elements it actually gave Dead Island a somewhat uniquely uneven tone.

From the looks of it however, even when it comes down to the marketing, Dead Island 2 has much more interest in being a light-hearted Dead Rising style game. But then, even Dead Rising had it's intense moments. (But lightly intense. 'Capcom intense' if you will. Weenie-hut-junior compared to the where Dead Island looked like it might be heading.) I wonder if perhaps that may be something of a smokescreen to obscure some equally as break-neck screech turns into the troubling and disturbed, or just an honest to goodness regression to a style of game that the team can feel comfortable in- wowing people on the basis of pure spectacle rather more so than in the dark minds of the narrative designers. (Personally, I don't know why we can't have both.)

Dead Island 2 has really cemented the fact for me that there really will never be a zombie movie or TV show that will be able to match games on terms of spectacle ever again. Video games totally and unreachably tower above anything that movie makers can feasibly do and can juggle their content better to fit the sensibilities of whichever audience they're approaching too. Whilst no one can sit here and tell you that the game we're seeing is destined to completely revolutionise zombie games as we know it, because I see no evidence of that level of supremacy in any footage we've seen, I think there's an argument to be made that this may just be one of the better titles from this genre ever released, which is insane to say after the mistakes that Dying Light 2, the sequel to the game that effectively leaped over the original Dead Island, made. I really am starting to believe in the undead magic of virtual Hollywood again- praise, Vecna!