Finally, Dead Island 2 has risen from the grave. On April 21, 2023, you’ll get your hands on Dead Island 2, a silly, gruesome action-adventure sequel. We spent a few hours with Dambuster Studios’ living dead and discovered a game that’s as customizable as it is gory. You decide how to deal with the undead. 

Right from the off, this is a game with a sense of style, and a silly one at that. Your character is selected from a group of passengers of a crashing plane. That’s crashing, not crashed. You select midair from six people frozen in the moment. The one you select will survive and hope to escape an LA that’s overrun by the undead. 

We chose Amy. Each of the six characters starts with two unique skill cards, only available as a starting choice that can’t be acquired through other means. One of Amy’s feeds into her athletic background, allowing her to dodge attacks, important in a melee-focussed game. She also looked pretty cool in a mesh shirt. Style is essential. 

Cards are a significant part of Dead Island 2’s identity. You collect them as you play, building a deck and swapping them out whenever you like. You’re encouraged to experiment, and it does make a difference. Along the way, we found a card called Safe Space. It sent out an explosion whenever we needed to use a health pack. With the fun, systemic violence at play, it completely up-ended our planned play style. Our initial ploy was to use Amy’s agility to dodge past zombies. With Safe Space installed, it turned us into a human bomb - we’d run into groups of them, take a hit, heal, and send a blast out that significantly weakened or outright killed most of them. 

It speaks to the work put into Dead Island 2’s underlying ethos. Amidst the gristle and gore is a game that wants you to discover your path. 

Your intent is to escape. Between you and freedom is a cast of GTA-esque characters, a number of zombies, and some large sections of the city. Dead Island 2’s not quite the open world of Dying Light 2, nor does it fill the levels with thousands of undead. Instead, you move between districts like Bel Air and Beverly Hills. These large levels are filled with details, like an influencer’s house that includes an apology script written on a whiteboard for not taking the situation seriously enough and a note about the pandemic that also talks about a turkey sandwich. There’s a smaller number of zombies than you’ve come to expect from modern zombie titles. But Dead Island 2’s undead are hard to kill, even with all the tricks that you have at your disposal. 



The FLESH system renders anatomically correct layers of skin, fat, muscle, breakable bones, and even organs. Somewhere within each zombie, a gallbladder waits to be stabbed, and eyeballs expect to be popped. This is the meat of the game, so to speak, and why Dead Island 2’s action lowers the numbers and ups the intensity. Sure, some creatures will fall to a perfectly timed whack to, or through, the skull, but the more you learn about the anatomical atrocities, the more you can tailor your attacks and tools. 

Weapons are just as varied. All of them have base effects. A machete is Sharp and can Maim, which regains stamina and is great against limbs. Some weapons have slots for mods and perks. With a High Impact perk installed, you can hit with increased force, turning the machete into a powerful limb slicer. We were amazed when, after a swift one-two slice, both arms of the target zombie dropped to the ground. It kept coming, though. So, we charged up a power attack by holding down Mouse 1 and aimed a super slice at its head, lopping it off. 

This sort of thing works with all kinds of weapons. Scaffolding poles become powerful face slammers. Electrified wrenches freeze Runners in their tracks as they’re zapped and stopped. And if you learn to love a particular weapon’s profile, you can keep it going at the workbench. Repairs will undo the wear and tear, and level matching will bring it along for the ride as you and the undead level up. 

There are undead variants all over the place just waiting to be experimented on. Base zombies are Walkers, Runners, and Shamblers, all procedurally generated from the George Romero school of casting. You’ll fight clowns, policemen, fast food delivery folk. Even the basic zombies can be wrapped in barbed wire, be on fire, or have grenades attached. Remember the Safe Space card mentioned earlier. You can set off the grenades with the blast from that. Things tend to work together to form pleasantly unpleasant effects. 

There are additional powers called Curveballs. These are items that you use once, then wait for a cooldown before reusing them. Shurikens will kneecap runners, turning them into crawlers; Pipe Bombs do what Pipe Bombs do. Meat Bait was our favorite, as it once again allowed us to remix the violence. LA’s torn-up world is billowing with flames, dangling wires, caustic pools, either as part of the level or spilled from Jerry Cans that you collect and use. Meat Bait will guide the undead to wherever its bloody splash lands, giving you a decent chance to lead zombies to water and electrocute them. 

The combos become a key method of playing. Zombie variants, such as Burning Shamblers, can be extinguished by a water-filled Jerry Can; groups can be led into explosive barrels with Meat Bait and blown up with a Pipe Bomb that sets off the cascade of explosions. 

The story progresses between the NPCs you meet up with. You save a famous actress from the plane crash and then work your way to her house, which acts as a hub. A gleaming little fortress amidst all the horror where you can trade, repair, craft discovered blueprints, and head off on missions from there. 

The main mission in our playtime was to find a hotel, an evacuation center that just happened to be hosting a wedding at the same time. It’s a fun example of the collision of story and circumstance that Dead Island 2 really wants to exploit. We passed through the hotel, goaded on by increasingly drunken messages from an army colonel over the intercom system. We passed by a pool filled with caustic solvent and realized the army was melting the bodies of the undead and possibly not-so-undead. Not only that, but we realized that the taunts weren’t aimed at us, but at the bride whose wedding the outbreak ruined. She was not happy. 

As we followed the colonel’s instructions to her room, we discovered she’s already dead. A monstrous zombie had taken her down. No joking, the first major boss fight is against the offended bride of the wedding. A Bridezilla. 

On the dance floor of the wedding reception, we battled Becky The Bride. Dying quite a lot because, though we’re immune to the zombie disease, we’re not immune to the raging bride’s charges and slams. A strategy emerged during this battle: You can throw and collect any of your weapons, which is a good tactic against Becky when you’re playing as Amy because she’s brutal up close. So we did that. We tossed carefully constructed Electrified Machetes, Rebar Poles, and more at her, circling, dodging, and grabbing the thrown items to be tossed again, slamming in a kick or a weapon should we get within range of her. 

It’s a funny twist on a boss fight, seeing a giant Bride raging on the dance floor, and it felt like we worked out a strategy that was uniquely ours. The taste of Dead Island 2 was enough for us to want more, and we can’t wait to return to HELL-A when the full game releases on Epic Games Store on April 21, 2023.