‘Dead Island 2’ game review: A great zombie survival horror with brutal combat and excellent visuals

Review of ‘Dead Island 2’, a zombie survival horror game

Dead Island was a fun game wherein you roamed around a tropical paradise trying to escape a zombie outbreak. It did not quite match its Electronic Entertainment Experience (E3) Trailer, which made the publishers and developers of the sequel very careful about what they put out during the promotions. After a long wait,  Dead Island 2 is out. And it embodies a fun, light-hearted jaunt through a zombie-infested Los Angeles in quarantine. 

While the tone may be airy and colourful, be prepared for some challenging combat.  Dead Island 2‘s zombies, however, are not for the faint of heart. The gore can get pretty extreme as you hack, slash, flay, bludgeon, burn, and electrocute these walking dead. Consider yourself warned.

Like the first game, you can select a character from a roster of six “slayers” with unique traits. You are launched through a flashy introduction, where all of them are trying to escape aboard a plane to leave LA. However, with the infected on board, the only way is down. Emerging from the wreckage with a handful of survivors, you have to fight your way through hordes of zombies to find the truth of the outbreak in the aptly renamed ‘HELL-A.’ Thankfully, you are immune to infection after being bitten at the start of the game.

Dead Island 2 is reminiscent of Zack Snyder’s zombie flicks, concerning its tone and style. The game has carefully crafted quests and sub-stories that veer from comical (you come across a Hugh Hefner-like character early in the game) and tragic to heroic. The top-notch environmental storytelling lets you piece together stories of how people have tried to keep the zombies at bay and perished after failing to do so.

While there are guns, the core of this horror survivor game is about bonking the zombies’ faces. The fighting mechanics take some time to get used to, especially with the iffy dodge and the weak melee attack. However, you can get a fun insta-kill if you time the prompts right. Once you get the hang of it, you will be dodging about like Muhammad Ali.

Every encounter in the game makes you feel like you are in  Oldboy or  Daredevil. You have to improvise a lot; and the game lets you create those opportunities. You have to use electrical wires, water, oil, and acid to create elemental traps to boil, shock, and burn the zombies. You need to size up the environment in each encounter and have fun mixing and matching your traps. Once you are done, you can lure the zombies to get fried on your improvised electrical puddle.

The graphics look incredible in  Dead Island 2. The work gone into creating layers of the zombies’ flesh, which reacts differently according to the type of weapon used, is especially superb. To counter the hordes of zombies, you can customise your weapons at workbenches but also earn skill cards to add new abilities, perks and more.