Dead Island 2 gameplay trailer and release date are both welcome surprises

Posted by

Boss on Aug 23, 2022 - 10:31PM

Dead Island – better late than never (pic: Deep Silver)

The biggest game reveal at Gamescom Opening Night Live was Dead Island 2, with the first gameplay trailer looking reassuringly impressive.

If you managed to sit through all two hours of Gamescom Opening Night Live, you will have noticed that while there were a lot of new game announcements and gameplay reveals most of them were for indie and AA titles.

The final reveal also wasn’t quite as high profile as usual, but that’s just how things have been in 2022 and at least Dead Island 2 did look pretty good – despite a terrible CGI trailer that tried to pretend otherwise.

If you switched off at that point, we suggest watching the gameplay trailer below, which was shown just a few minutes later and was a lot more impressive. Although it’s so gory that it has had to be censored, even though it’s already only for the strong of stomach.

It’s been a famously long wait for Dead Island 2, as it’s taken eight years and three different developers to get this far, but it will now finally, hopefully, be released on February 3, 2023.

Confusingly, it doesn’t actually take place on an island, but instead a zombie-filled L.A. Although there seems to be an Escape from New York style thing going on, with everyone kept inside city limits – so we guess the idea is that that’s a bit like an island.

Anyway, the trailer doesn’t really go into much detail on the plot, other than you have some sort of immunity to becoming a zombie, with an implying you’ll be able to evolve various superpowers as a result of your special status.

The game is now being developed by British developer Dambuster Studios, which in another life was TimeSplitters creator Free Radical Design.

They’ve repeatedly said that the game will have the same pulpy tone as the original, although that’s not particularly clear from any of the footage. But then again, the original wasn’t nearly as funny or clever as it thought if was, so hopefully the sequel will be an improvement in that regard.

It certainly looks a lot better, with some really good visuals, so maybe the wait will prove to have been worth it after all.

Dead Island 2 will launch on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, PC, and Stadia on February 3, 2023.