The original 2011 Dead Island and its 2013 sequel Riptide have a special place – if “special” is the right word – in the rancid, suppurating hearts of games journalists above a certain age. Their design and promotion captured an era in gaming that isn’t entirely bygone. On the one hand, there was Dead Island’s brute-force tearjerker of a CGI trailer, depicting the final moments of a little girl in reverse – a piece of cinematic wizardry and a bid for the eternally coveted status of Blockbuster That Made Me Feel Something. On the other, Riptide’s tawdry zombie bikini model pre-order collectible.
Put those two things together and you have vintage triple-A culture in a nutshell: arty aspirations and smirking sleaze, prestige melodrama meets splatterhouse guts and cleavage, all of it orbiting a moderately entertaining co-op action-RPG about punching zombies for randomised weapons which, in hindsight, feels like patient zero for schlooters such as Bungie’s Destiny.
Dead Island 2, meanwhile, used to be a byword for vapourware: announced in 2014 with Spec Ops: The Line developer Yager at the helm, eventually farmed out to licensed spin-off powerhouse Sumo Digital, and finally reassigned to Dambusters, developer of the atmospheric but underwhelming Homefront: The Revolution. That’s the kind of journey to shelves you expect to leave obvious scars. In practice, Dead Island 2 is a slick and substantial 20+ hour looting game that rarely puts a foot wrong, but also never gets your pulse jumping, and struggles to do anything very intriguing with its not-unintriguing setting.
