Butcho’s unique design aspect is his arm bones, which have been filed down into twin spears that he uses to pin me to the ground. While many of the corpses I’ve seen so far stick overly close to the classic playbook (a few definitely owe a debt to Left4Dead), they’re still admirably and gruesomely detailed. He’s the best example in the demo of Dambuster’s genuinely great zombie design. With the building cleared of enemies I’m able to power up the ferris wheel and move on to my next challenge: an encounter with the absolutely disgusting Butcho, a decomposing clown. Hopefully the wider world of LA provides a healthy supply of enemy and environmental opportunities to ensure these elements are a constant feature in battles. An impressive variety of zombie types helps tie this together among the colourful hordes are corpses with gas canisters and water bottles, and you need only target them to add some elemental fun to a fight. But water also conducts electricity, turning harmless puddles into death traps when combined with a battery. Oil can be set ablaze with flames, and water can douse those flames. It’s a chance to toy around with the more systemic layer of Dead Island 2’s combat: a dynamic elemental system that calls to mind BioShock. That requires - you guessed it - getting through a building filled with even more zombies. The ferris wheel on the pier is powered down so I need to reboot the electricity. You can freely experiment with a variety of different techniques without being forced to stop for breath every ten seconds. While there is a stamina system, it’s incredibly generous. And it's the fact that Dead Island 2 seems to keep up that rhythm that has me impressed. Being able to strike, dodge out of the way of a grab, and then immediately hurl a molotov in quick succession is a pretty fun rhythm. Throwable weapons known as Curveballs (grenades, shurikens, bait bombs and the like) can also be weaved into the usual whirlwind of hacks and slashes. The combat system encourages constant movement, with dodges, kicks, and jumps all integral parts. Twenty or so dead zeds later, I find that – while it does still have a bit of that ‘waving a stick around’ feel a lot of first-person melee falls foul of – Dead Island 2 has got a few good ideas powering its battles. Thankfully my search for the Blood Drive brings me to Santa Monica Pier, and the line for the ferris wheel is full of undead ready to be crash-test dummies. That gore is all well and good, but the combat that leads to that bloodshed needs to be just as accomplished. On more than a couple of occasions I have to pause just to laugh off a new, ridiculous mess I’ve made. 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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