There is a good amount of variety between them, but the quality of their writing is rather hit-and-miss. This leaves the differentiation between the characters resting almost entirely on their unique appearance and voice lines. Most of the time, while playing, players won’t even think to take advantage of the innate skills, and they won’t miss out on much for doing so. Each character having their own innate skills to define their playstyles is great on paper, but in practice, they struggle to feel impactful enough to be worthwhile. The setting is explored by up to four players at a time, with each controlling one of six unique characters to try and escape the quarantine after learning they are immune to the zombie virus.Įach of the six playable characters come with their own stats and two passive abilities, like healing after killing a zombie with a heavy attack or getting stat-boosting stacks after blocking attacks. Sometime before the start of the game, Hell-a was subjected to quarantine, leaving many citizens to fend for themselves against the ever-growing hordes of zombies patrolling its sunny streets. To start with, Dead Island 2 takes the series to a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles, cheekily referred to as Hell-a. Now that Dead Island 2 has emerged on the other side of its languished development, the time has come to see how a decade has changed the zombie-slaying series. The final form of Dead Island 2 has been developed by Deep Silver Dambuster Studios and published by Deep Silver.
In 2014 Dead Island 2 was revealed only to spend nearly a decade being passed around between development teams.
The first Dead Island was released in 2011 with a standalone expansion, Dead Island Riptide, following it in 2013 that continued the original’s story and increased its level cap.