It was definitely worth the development time and effort at least in the short term, the copious amounts of wet, chunky gore proves incredibly entertaining. You can even tear the undead apart with your bare hands courtesy of Fury mode, an Ultimate-like ability powered by the zombie infection that slowly floods your veins over the course of the story.įuelling all this splatter is a bespoke system Dambuster calls ‘FLESH’ (Fully Locational Evisceration System for Humanoids), which procedurally shreds zombies with each strike. Flames char skin and melt muscle, leaving just blackened skeletons behind. Flesh slices open, guts spill out, and limbs fly off bodies. While guns are an occasionally valid option, brutally gory melee combat is Damnbuster’s big focus for Dead Island 2. But for now, the only thing to care about is butchering zombies in increasingly horrific ways. At this mid-point in the campaign, I’m on a beach searching for a laptop containing a ‘Blood Drive’ for plot reasons that I’m sure will make more sense once I’ve played the preceding hours. The final version will support three-player co-op, for now I’m stuck solo in what Dambuster affectionately calls ‘Hell A’ a bright and bizarre Los Angeles that’s been devastated by a recent zombie outbreak.

The short demonstration puts me in control of Amy, one of six different playable characters. In fact, much of what I’ve played looks reasonably similar to the gameplay we saw of the original version, but with a few modern upgrades.

Despite all this, that sun-soaked, humorous, pulpy vision from the original trailer remains. Rather than continuing its predecessors’ work, Dambuster has built a new version of Dead Island 2 entirely from scratch.

While that vision was first put together by Yager Development, and then passed onto Sackboy: A Big Adventure creator Sumo Digital, Dead Island 2 is now in the hands of Dambuster Studios, the folks behind Homefront: The Revolution. Despite a long absence, Dead Island 2 is still what it originally set out to be: an open-world, co-op, California-set sequel to Techland’s well-received (if incredibly shonky) original.

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