
So during the selection screen, which is presented in a hilarious way that I wouldn’t want to ruin for people after a brief but bombastic cutscene, you can scroll through all the slayers, and it’ll give you a brief description of them as well as their unique abilities, strengths, and weaknesses. I was given access to all six Slayers, but for the preview, I decided to pick Ryan, the exotic dancer who also had the highest level of toughness. It gives us a perspective we haven’t seen in video games before, a pure pulpy action movie over the top Hollywood take on the zombie genre with some fantastic system to keep things constantly fresh. So before I dive into it for those who want to keep themselves in the dark, I will leave you with this, Dead Island 2 was terrific.

I have never been so delighted to be so incredibly wrong. So what must it do to show us that Dead Island 2 was ready to rock our worlds? It turns out they knew all along… I was worried about the years of studio changes and that we had seen so many zombie games in the first-person RPG genre.

So while my initial expectations for Dead Island 2 were not good. After years of seemingly development hell, it was hard to envision a world where Dead Island 2would shock and awe upon release. Eventually, in 2018 Deep Silver announced that Dambuster Studios, an internal Deep Silver team, had taken charge of the development of Dead Island 2. The following year Sumo Digital announced that it had taken up the mantle to develop Dead Island 2. In 2015 Deep Silver announced that Yager and Deep Silver had parted ways from the project. What we got was way different, but overall I did have a lot of fun with it.įast forward to 2014, we got a trailer for Dead Island 2 from Yager Development since Techland was focused on Dying Light. But since seeing their announcement video in 2006, I had this fever-pitch hype for Dead Island.

I believe the cinematic trailer we got of the family fighting in the resort room was their nod to what was originally the story. That and the game centering around a family trying to escape the island were also slightly changed. When Dead Island was announced in 2006, Techland, developer of the original Dead Island, showed off this real-time flesh damage video that was eventually cut from the final product. While I was a big fan of Dead Island from 2011 and its follow-up Dead Island Riptide, my interest in the series goes back much further.

Over the past few weeks, I have been allowed to play through roughly six hours of the upcoming Dead Island 2.
