These survivors in general are pretty meek and lazy, content to send me out on errands all over the island while they sit in their nice air-conditioned offices/bungalows while they await for my timely deliveries of supplies in return for a lame brass knuckles that will break in 10 hits and then be morbidly expensive to repair. 'Riptide' sheds more light on the background of the infection, but it’s a slow, dry process and the gameplay that surrounds it is little changed from the original. I chose the disgraced Australian cop as my hero, but all of them have little in the way of personality, and the same can be said of most of the NPC/questgivers. I punched and kicked people and sometimes shot them, and every kill was nearly identical. Some of the weapons are kind of cool, but not cool enough to make it a delight to sprint around a tropical paradise and wipe out hordes of undead with shovels and sticks. The fetch tedium could be alleviated by novel combat, but there’s not much of that to be had here. It plays well enough, but in practice this kind of gameplay can become a slog. Survivors give quests, almost always of the fetch or kill variety, which award experience, weapon blueprints and such, and these weapons can be crafted at various workbenches.
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Each hero has a different rage ability that can be activated periodically, like pulling out a pistol with free ammo and shooting indiscriminately for a set period of time (and also alerting anything within earshot). Some of them are special snowflakes and can sprint, or have huge health bars or other attacks, a trend popularized in 'Left 4 Dead' and later refined in 'Dying Light'.Įvery zombie has a level, and heroes have levels too with skills and such like an RPG. Most of the zombies are garden variety walkers - easy to dispatch one-on-one, but dangerous in groups. The infection is much the same as it always is - mysterious, apocalyptic, with a few heroes having immunity and trying to help others as they try to escape. Guns are loud after all and ammunition can be scarce on a resort island, so these zombies are usually dispatched with crowbars, knives, paddles, and anything else that you can swing at an infected. They could be described as shooters I suppose, but the 'Dead Islands' are more like first-person melee games. Techland went ahead and made a decent enough zombie game anyways, a kind of action FPS with MMO sensibilities that did well enough to inspire a middling sequel and then a poor spin-off from another developer.
That wasn’t stopping developers from making them, far from it - but the zeitgeist had moved on. When 'Dead Island' was released, zombie games had already passed their prime.