Games
Dead Island 2 makes pretty the undead apocalypse, but does it breathe new life into the genre?
Dead Island was a game with issues. When it launched in 2011, the putrefied landscape of the post-zombie-apocalypse was already becoming well-trodden. Left 4 Dead channeled 28 Days Later's sprinting 'infected' into one of the best–selling games across the Xbox 360's lifetime, while Dead Rising lifted the idea of a wackier zombie shopping mall experience right out of George Romero's 1978 film Dawn of the Dead (with wieldable katanas, shower heads and manequin limbs thrown in for good measure).
Dead Island, by contrast, chucked a little girl out a window. In slow motion. Backwards. Her tiny broken body was slurped up off the lawn of a luxury hotel and back into her parents' room, where she proceeded to un-bite her father, who, it turned out, had just failed to protect her from a ravenous undead horde with an axe. A piano sadly tinkled along to the carnage. That was the promise of Dead Island: zombies, but characters and emotions and tragedy, too.
In the end, the game came up short. The trailer didn't have a lot to do with the game's co-op bread and butter: running about the fictional tropical island of Banoi stoving in the heads of walkers with bats, and getting beaten and eaten by over-leveled boss enemies. But at least, at the time, Dead Island was offering something new. Though it traded tear-jerking piano solos for electrified machetes, it was still an open world to explore and survive, and not quite like anything else.
And that's a problem for Dead Island 2. Because in the years since the first game booted us out of our sun loungers into a holiday resort full of monsters, zombie games in all shapes and forms have spread like plague. Some are even taking the promises of the original and delivering where it didn't.
You want a zombie game that makes you cry? Here's The Walking Dead. You want free-roaming survival? Carve yourself off a dripping chunk of DayZ. And if you want an open–world, console–based undead slash-em–up for your Xbox One or PS4, you've got Dead Island 2. Or Dying Light. Or Dead Rising 3. Or Sunset Overdrive.
Like a horde of zombies pressing up against the windows of a barricaded shopping mall, developers and publishers know there's still meat on this genre, and they're crowding in. There's a big, fat carcass to be had if you can convince players that your game is the next shambling step forward in zombie survival. But with so many hands clawing at gamers' collective wallet, is there anything new left to do?
Dead Island 2's new developers Yager seem to think so. They describe the game they're building as "the world's smallest MMO" – a perpetually online experience that dumps survivors of (another) zombie outbreak in the quarantine zone of post-infection California.
From what we've seen and played, it's a game defined by conspicuous absences. There's no horror, for instance – a zombie might make you jump, but the game's world is brightly lit and deliberately oversaturated with color. And while there is a story, the meat of the gameplay is based around random events – a chopper crash that players can fight over for supplies, for example, or in our demo play, a noisy houseparty that needs defending from unwelcome undead houseguests.
Gone is the plinky-plonky piano of the first trailer. Gone too, the tragic couple deliberately burning themselves to death in the cabin of a boat surrounded by an impenetrable moat of ghouls (as featured in the trailer for Dead Island's not-quite-sequel, Riptide). In their place, we get a trailer starring a fraudulent fitness instructor, obliviously going for a jog as other Californians are set upon by zombies in the background, before graphically mutating into a lolloping corpse himself (his bicep implants flopping out from under his putrefying skin as he does so). Yager are making a point: in Dead Island 2, the zombies are played for laughs.
"The trailer definitely matches the tone we're going for," Isaac Ashdown, one of Dead Island 2's senior gameplay programmers tells Red Bull. "It's a kind of lighthearted take on what would happen if a zombie apocalypse came to California, and all the people who stayed behind saw it as an opportunity for a new way of life. When you looked at the first game and the tone of the trailer, and then at how people were playing it, there was a kind of disconnect. There was a disconnect between what the game was trying to get them to feel, and what they were actually doing. So we've gone the direction of creating a game with a tone that matches how people actually played."
That's not necessarily a cop-out, or even a bad thing. Dead Rising 1 and 2 showed that zombie games don't have to be gruelling to be fun – largely by letting heroes Frank West and Chuck Greene strip off all their clothes and pedal full-tilt at zombies on tricycles. Dead Island 2 is more restrained than that (the 2009 movie Zombieland is a tonal inspiration, says Ashford), but po-faced it is not. This is a perverse postcard picture of California: the sun is shining, the Hollywood Sign sits bright on the hill, and when you take an enemy's head off, the corpse might plod around in board shorts for a minute before keeling over.
But dialing up the gore and the saturation alone does not a good game make. When we play the demo, we're in co-op with three other players (though when the game releases, servers will hold up to eight at a time). Our goal, we're told by the rep, is 'to kill as many zombies as possible'. Not the dramatic leap forward for the genre we were hoping for, but OK, we're game.
And so we charge about a roped off segment of the California suburbs, flailing at zombies with knives, setting off car alarms, raiding stores and gas stations for loot (and electric shotguns), and finally ending up at the barricade in front of this house party thrown by survivors so ker-azy that their response to the screaming death of their loved ones is to throw a massive kegger. The routine is familiar: we backpedal and strafe around, chopping at zombies with bladed and blunt weapons and saving our punchier firearms for the hulking, chunkier Thugs who inevitably show up to boost the difficulty.
It's OK. When you strike at a zombie in front of you, you've got the choice of a light, quick attack, good for dispatching enemies in a group; or you can really wind back for torso-cleaving heavy blow that might split them in two or cannon them off into the sky. If you liked the combat in Dead Island, good news! This is more of that.
But it also carries with it some of the earlier games' flaws. The game is still in an early stage, but from the short time we spent with the demo, it can be picky about what does and doesn't constitute a connection with an enemy. There's also a dizzying amount of motion blur, which combined with the orange-saturated palette feels a bit like trying to do a trapeze wearing goggles full of Fanta. These could just be glitches, but they're glitches that really grab you by the throat when Ashford describes the "visceral first person combat" as "one of the key things about Dead Island".
"It's really over-the-top, really in-your-face, and it's really fun to play with friends. That's the core reason people play Dead Island," he says.
Motion blur and hit detection are problems that can be fixed. But here's the game's biggest challenge: with at least two other thematically-similar games (Dying Light and Sunset Overdrive) releasing either side of it, Dead Island 2, as it stands, doesn't seem to have an answer to the question we asked of Dead Rising 3 a year ago – how do you stop a zombie game from getting old?
Placing the emphasis on players to 'write their own stories' rather than writing one for them might be the genius glue that binds open-world zombie killing to that other bottomless pit of player time and money: the massively multiplayer online game. Or, it might be laziness, and leave Dead Island 2's California feeling more like a cyclical string of random encounters than a living, breathing apocalypse.
Dead Island 2, then, has potential. The first person zombie slaying looks cool (when hits connect), enough weapons and crafting options could bring the MMO-lite appeal of games like Borderlands to a West Coast USA apocalypse, and while no-one's talking story yet (take from that what you will) the team behind the game also made Spec Ops: The Line and if anyone can weave narrative and bloody violence together, it's German developer Yager. But there's a bigger problem stalking Dead Island 2 and its ilk, and that's how to ensure your zombie game doesn't end up just another face in the horde.
Want to experience the best of RedBull.com on the move? Get the app at RedBull.com/app.
