Dead Island 2 (Multi)
By: Deep Silver
“THE dead arose and appeared to many” quoth the Bible, and the good book really hit the nail on the head with 2011’s cult corpse-basher Dead Island.
It's been a long time coming, but the sequel finally brings some splashy B-movie gore to consoles with a tongue-in-cheek, splatter-laden zombiefest that’s a cut above the low-rent original.
Shifting the action to clearly-not-an-island Los Angeles and setting its sights on Hollywood, players choose their character from a sextet of survivors and go through the gonzo motions of a zombie apocalypse in La La Land. The standout is Dani - a "foul-mouthed brawler from Ireland" who apparently “hails from the mosh pits of County Cork".
Just as the best zombie flicks mix satire with splatter, Dead Island 2 skewers all that's wrong with the entertainment industry, with pot-shots at everything from the exploitation of workers to insufferable influencers.
20-odd hours of scrappy bludgeoning, slicing, and shooting await, with a melee-heavy combat system that sees players taking out hordes of starving coffin-dodgers with swords, baseball bats, sledgehammers and axes. Gory finishing moves spruce things up, but it's largely rinse-and-repeat, style over substance stuff that sags like a zombie’s bum cheeks about halfway through.
Waves of CGI stiffs are fortified with bloated giants, hunched goblins and plenty of bosses while most encounters are littered with puddles of petrol, acid, or water, letting players choose the correct weapon to ignite, corrode or fry your undead foe.
While rough around the edges, the gore here is off the scale, enabled by the game's FLESH engine - Fully Locational Evisceration System for Humanoids. Simulating the physics of grisly dismemberment, you can hack off limbs and heads with anatomical realism and toast or melt skin, as muscles, organs and the skeleton beneath reveal themselves with each sinewy blow.
Even the marketing is unhinged, with the publisher and UK insurance company Dead Happy offering a "deathwish" policy. A mere £8k ensures "a wake to end all wakes", instructing loved ones "to both zombie-proof the recently deceased and toast their passing with a blow-out in Los Angeles before the city becomes the Hell-A we see in the game".
Despite the Hollywood setting, Dead Island 2’s take on the well-shuffled zombie genre is more straight-to-video than blockbuster, but does exactly what it says on the tin, meaning seasoned gore-hounds are in for a blast.
