![]() As both Worrall and Stenton explain, these cards can be found as you play and unlock more options as you progress. Some cards have buffs and perks as well, so you could take damage to gain stamina and so on. For example, I could have swapped my dodge for a block move that would let me tank through problems more. There's more depth to Dead Island 2's combat than I really got to fully appreciate in 30 or so minutes I was able to play - aside from the various elemental mods that let you attach damage types like fire, electrical, and acid to your weapons, there's a skill card system that lets you craft different character builds. I feel like everyone's going to have preferences, but I really liked the solidity of the axe's heavy swing, which suited my fighting flow. According to game director David Stenton, "the big focus is the visceral combat, it's about killing zombies in spectacular ways" and that's definitely what it felt like to me.Īnd, obviously, there were a ton of weapons to play around with everything from an offensively loud revolver/hand cannon to flaming axes, katanas, claws and so on. There are a range of environmental factors to look out for, too, like live wires and gas canisters, which you can use to your advantage in combat. Battling these corpses easily settles into a solid rhythm of making some space to read what's around you, picking a target, and then nipping in and out to land blows while dodging clear of attacks and other threats as they close in. In terms of zombies there's a fairly familiar mix of grunts, heavys, spitters, explody-ones, and so on – as well as elemental things like electric types – that make a good mix to deal with. I got slightly stuck trying to clear a set piece horde battle around the Santa Monica ferris wheel but, while it took me about four goes to clear, I never really minded – the fighting isn't overly complex but the mix of timing swings and dodges, or repositioning and reappraising threats from the various zombie types, has a hard to put down flow. ![]() By the developers' own admission, the demo I played was getting its first public outing and what they'd planned as a 20 minute experience ended up being more like 30-45, with the difficulty hitting a little higher than anticipated for first-time players dropped into a midpoint mission. The key thing that sells this to me so far is that the core Dead Island 2 combat loop is really satisfying. The wet is blood, just in case the metaphor wasn't clear. Dead Island 2 is the kind of ride with warning signs saying people at the front will get wet that only makes everyone crowd to the front more. One of the phrases thrown around by the development team is that Dead Island is "about thriving, not just surviving", and that's reflected in the more theme park zombie apocalypse vibe the studio has created here, versus Techland's more broody rooftop botherer. The FPS styling might look similar, but with a much brighter color palette and a more chipper, quippy feel to its story and characters, there's a much more 'fun' vibe to all the death. ![]() "It's fully anatomical,'' explains Worrall, "so we've got layers of skin and fat, muscle, and all the organs inside."ĭambuster's Dead Island 2 is going to get compared a lot to Techland's Dying Light 2 as another first person zombie smasher, but even with the blood and guts there's a much lighter tone overall. ![]() It's the passion project of an apparently overzealous lead technical art director, a system that is designed to procedurally generated damage anywhere on a zombie. system behind all the bloodlust – short for Fully Locational Evisceration System for Humanoids. According to creative director James Worrall, there's a cutely named F.L.E.S.H.
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