Publisher Deep Silver is doubling down on zombie massacring mayhem with Dead Island 2, the follow-up to the 2011 zombie RPG Dead Island. But a lot has changed since 2011. Original Dead Island developer Techland has moved on to another project, and replacement developer Yager is making a game that involves plenty of dead, but not much in the way of islands. Dead Island 2 is set in California, and at PAX Prime I got the chance to drop into one of the game’s Golden State suburbs to wreak some zombie havoc.
The world of Dead Island 2 is surprisingly bright for a zombie apocalypse. Even the blood—and there are copious amounts of blood in this game—is a cheery shade of crimson, and stomping on a zombie’s head feels a little bit like painting the sidewalk. It’s a bit too cheery-looking to feel realistic, in fact, but I think that may be what the developers were going for.
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Unfortunately, the gameplay isn’t on the same level as the game’s visuals yet. Dead Island 2 doesn’t release until 2015, so there’s plenty of time for the devs to get it right, but the pre-alpha game I played last week was marred with two major problems.
The first and most obvious: the game’s performance was awful. The demo was limited to a very small area and there were never that many zombies on the screen, but whenever there were more than a few, the game’s framerate dropped like a rock. That was a huge problem since the game’s combat is pretty melee-heavy; a lot of the time I was playing I had no idea what was happening because the FPS was so low and irregular, so I was just spamming the trigger randomly. The demo was running on a PS4, and it was pre-alpha, but still…I was a bit surprised the developers felt it was ready to be shown to the public.
The other issue was that the zombie AI was, to be quite frank, terrible. The game featured a variety of zombie types from your basic walkers to runners and a beefy thugs, but all of them were dumb. I saw zombies stare at me as I walked right past them with no response. I saw zombies stand there as I bashed them in the head several times before they finally responded. I saw zombies getting stuck in the walls and tripping over each other. It wasn’t good.
The game’s performance issues will likely be fixed before release, but I’m hoping the team also still has a lot to do on the zombie AI. I’m not sure why the game was being pushed so hard—there were massive banners at PAX encouraging gamers to “go hands-on” with the game—given the major issues it seems to have. I think there’s the potential for a fun game somewhere in Dead Island 2, but it definitely isn’t there yet, and I would steer far clear of preordering the game until we know whether these issues are going to be resolved.
Disclaimer: Strife developer S2 Games paid for GiA’s travel and accommodations in Seattle. We accepted because we maintain full editorial control (we can still write whatever we want), and because we think our audience is genuinely interested in Strife and a bunch of the other games at PAX. For more information about our ethics policy, click here.
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