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!

Dead Island 2 is back from the dead

 Who woulda thunk?

In 2011, a video game called Dead Island was released to raised eyebrows, mostly due to the fact that the game sold itself on the strength of an initial CG reveal trailer that revolved around heartbreak, emotion turmoil and the tragedy indicative of a zombie apocalypse, only for the game to throw most of that away so that it could focus on the silly and inane style of zombie slaying that video games can't seem to shy away from. It wouldn't be until the Last of Us that we got a game that would live up to Dead Island's initial promise. None of which is to say that Dead Island 1 was a bad game, per se; it just wasn't really the game that many people were expecting it to be. When expectations were adjusted however; Dead Island turned out to be a perfectly fine and fun zombie game, that absolutely got stale before it's second half but which is otherwise a decent enough time.

I think that the focus on melee combat alongside a morbidly well realised gore system that allowed players to bash zombies in pretty modular and satisfying ways allowed for the game general flaws to be swept aside under the pure fun of just playing the thing. In fact, I'd say that Dead Island's zombies, with the ability to actually slice off chunks of flesh was pretty much the height of industry zombie gore design until Resident Evil 2 Remake came along with it's RE engine, that pretty much nailed locational damage down to the specifics. And the resort island setting certainly made for a very unique visual setting to slay monsters in, keeping the premise feeling fresh for about as long as the narrative could manage. However, the game never really got the sequel that so many thought it deserved. There was some quite lacklustre DLC content, a spiritual successor in Dying Light which bought the game closer to the scary and emotional-charged angle that the original was hinting at, but no real Dead Island 2.

That was until that teaser trailer from what feels like a whole generation ago, wherein we got a little look at a game much more in-line with what Dead Island represents; campey, gorey fun. I think that whole 'jogger going down Venice Beach' trailer slowly became more infamous than famous as it became the posterboy for games that never come out, however. Dead Island 2, this time it's in LA, crept out of industry show line-ups for years as the game underwent set-back after set-back, at least one total reboot of development, and enough team shakeups to make any sensible onlooker sceptical. Personally, I was starting to look at this game as modern day vapourware. A promise of something that would never really come into fruition, and certainly not in the way that fans were dreaming for. A disaster package waiting to drop on our heads. And you know what? I may be eating crow on this one.

Dead Island 2 is not only a real game that was shown off with a gameplay trailer this time around proving it's legitimacy, it actually looks pretty good. It's not an industry changer by any stretch of the imagination, and it hasn't made any grand promises as of the scope of what the game will offer, but in a way I can very much respect that restraint. Whereas Dying Light 2 tripped over itself to rave about the scope of adaptiveness within the game world, shifting to attune to your specific choices, only for the real game to fall, predictably, flat on that promise; Dead Island 2 wants you to kill zombies in horrific, brutal, and at times in a nearly DOOM-esque fashion. That is something that can be proved already from the gameplay we have, and it's a promise that the team seem capable of living up to in gusto. So much so that Geoff Keighley had the Gamescon version of the trailer censored. Which turned out to be a cheap gimmick just to funnel people into watching the uncut trailer on Youtube; there was literally nothing any more objectionable in the 'censored' clips.

What we seem to have is a deliciously violent celebration of all that Dead Island 1 got right rendered in a scale-up to modern standards that I certainly wasn't sure was possible after a development period this strangled. I mean this game looks good, although that is an easy bar to clear after the recent release of Saints Row. (Sheesh.) You have the reflections, high poly zombie models, great looking blood and gore effects, and a real sense of scale now that we have the city of angels to explore. Even though I think you have to squint mighty hard to call Los Angeles an Island. I guess it's part of an island, but only if you're willing to call a continent an Island and personally I'm not. Honestly, I'd feel more comfortable calling a zombie game set in Manhattan an island, because that would technically be true.

But I suppose we're all about capturing that lazy vibe of the sea-side resort bleached in sun and vacation vibes; for which I must say that Dead Island 2 is really holding up it's end of the bargain. The second half of Dead Island 1 took us into the city and then onwards to the jungle, both environments that weren't really what fans wanted and thus those parts of the game pretty roundly sucked. Dying Light went on to explore those environments and how to make them fun, leaving Dead Island 2 to lean further into the resort vibe from the first half. Of course, we'll no doubt have to explore the residentials in the Hollywood hills, and the busy streets of downtown, but being able to see the ocean at practically any point is going to soothe that claustrophobic spirit before it can rattle too hard.

Dead Island's biggest problem, in my opinion, was how stringently is appealed to it's RPG formula to the point where the game turned into a looter style title in it's later chapters. Yes, that means you'd have levelled weapons and gear that suddenly grew ineffective because these enemies were too powerful. You could save all your guns for the big dangerous moments, only to find out that they hardly did any damage whatsoever. When you have zombies as the chief enemy of your game, it kinda rubs raw having them become bullet sponges because of some arbitrary damage formula which decided not to work your way. Maybe the many years in development has given the developers time to effectively consider this, or maybe they'll just throw in another annoying overly RPG'd system. Who knows at this point.

If this game actually does come out and is as fun as the trailer says, then we might have to totally rewrite the fundamental rules about how vapourware functions in the modern age. The commonly understood pattern is: game is announced, game gets vanished, game resurfaces, game is bad. I'm not saying that Dead Island 2 is primed to break that pattern, but it certainly wants us to believe that is can and screw it, I wanna believe. We may not exactly be starved for zombie games but after Dying Light 2 kind of let me down a bit in the story department I welcome another approach to a big budget zombie hit because hey, there's just something special about zombie killing in video games, ain't there? Do I suspect that the game is going to slip over itself in it's attempt to differentiate itself from Dying Light? (Even after Dying Light 2 lost the mood of the original game) Yes I do... but what's hype with a dose of reality swinging over us like a guillotine?