- Publisher: Deep Silver
- Release Date: Apr 21, 2023
- Also On: PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One
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- Critic score
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- Unscored
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Apr 20, 2023It has the potential to be game of the year.
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Apr 18, 2023Sure, there’s a zombie apocalypse happening, but Dead Island 2 might be the most fun end-of-days yet. The dark humour, gratuitous violence and sandbox-esque playground of LA allows you to come up with some beautiful and brutal zombie kills.
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Apr 21, 2023I am impressed with Dead Island 2. The first Dead Island didn’t grab me as much and it was only when I tried the demo at the recent WASD event that it piqued my interest. There is a lot to enjoy about Dead Island 2. It looks stunning graphically, the story – although surreal – is gripping enough and the skill card level progression is refreshing. The combat is the feature that feels familiar and could have been quite dull over time, but Dambuster have introduced many things (such as curveballs) to keep things interesting. Fun solo, but even more enjoyable with a few friends, this long awaited zombie slasher comes recommended.
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Apr 18, 2023Dead Island 2 surprisingly becomes a great sequel. Brutal action, extreme violence and above all, a lot of fun awaits us in the new Dambuster's title.
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Apr 19, 2023Dambuster Studios has delivered a fun, immersive and very polished game that fans should really appreciate and enjoy. Thus, the wait was most definitely worth it!
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Apr 18, 2023As expected, Dead Island 2 is not a game that extensively scores with complex gameplay in a regular sense. You mostly kill zombies, but in a never seen before marked brutal and detailed diversive manner. And the last is the core of a great first person zombie action game and the reason why you need to play it, regardless if you prefer playing it solo or in online co-op mode.
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Apr 26, 2023Featuring a literally jaw dropping, procedural zombie damage system, a diverse and entertaining cast and high production values from start to finish, Dead Island 2 not only manages to live up to the expectations set by its two mainline prequels over a decade ago--it blows them right out of the water.
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Apr 18, 2023A California scream, Dead Island 2 finally crosses the finish line after nine years as an accomplished and deliriously fun first-person zombie mash 'em up. The stomach-churning gore might not be for everyone, but fans of body horror and viscera will be well-served here.
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Apr 18, 2023Dead Island 2 is fantastic. It knows what it is, and that’s a ton of sneakily smart dumb fun. The FLESH system is horrific and awful and the best. Smashing, chopping, burning, and exploding humans has never been so fun. At $70 some may want to wait as it isn’t the longest campaign. I’m already doing a second playthrough though, and this is a game I’ll be coming back to for a long time.
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Apr 24, 2023For a game that had such a long development cycle, this game feels like it made use of all that time. Dambuster really knocked it out of the park with this sequel. If you’re a fan of Dead Island, you’ll easily enjoy what this game has to offer. It may have not have the parkour that Dying Light has in it, but it definitely beats Dying Light in its zombie-slaying gameplay. I had a great time with this game and I’m still looking forward to playing through the game with other characters. Dead Island 2 truly delivers!
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Apr 19, 2023Dead Island 2 is a fun FPS action romp that succeeds at making you feel like a zombie-slaying god. It’s not going to set the gaming world on fire, and yes, there are some issues, but slaughtering my way across LA never got old.
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Apr 18, 2023Even with all the odds going against it, Dead Island 2 stays focused on its main missions, and succeeds in accomplishing them. The game finds balance between the first game's more serious take and the reveal trailer's lighter approach while making the gameplay and world design much better - although they are still far from perfect.
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Apr 18, 2023Dead Island 2 is exactly what you expected from this franchise: much fun and little thinking. Its combat is great and it has a big replayabilty component, but its story could be better.
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Apr 18, 2023Dead Island 2 is a concentrated dose of zombie-slaying fun. It’s a marvel to see it released at all after its tumultuous development, but Dambuster Studios has managed to more than deliver on its promise of a slasher that takes everything the original Dead Island set out as a blueprint and expand on it in an interesting way. It’s not perfect and won’t change the gaming landscape, but you’ll certainly have a blast ripping and tearing your way through sun-drenched Hell-A with more than a few surprises along the way.
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Apr 18, 2023Was Dead Island 2 worth the wait? Hell yes! The sheer carnage you can cause on the streets of LA is marvellous to witness, and with Dambuster's attention to detail, uncovering hidden caches of weapons, meeting the colourful variety of survivors around the city, and hanging with friends is a ton of fun. My main concern is that there isn't quite enough endgame content to really appreciate the power you unlock with a fully-upgraded character, so my hope is that future DLC allows us to enjoy it more. While a few visual aspects could certainly do with being remedied, there is no doubt that Dambuster Studios was the right developer for the job, and I'll be looking forward to seeing where the team takes the franchise in the future.
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Apr 18, 2023It is useless to get around it: we all feared that Dead Island 2 was vaporware at first, and then that it would arrive on the shelves not quite in shape, after a long, complicated development that did not bode well. And instead, for once, we are here to tell you about a happy ending: even without rewriting new pages in the history of first-person action RPGs, Dambuster Studios' zombie game turns out to be hilarious, long-lived, with only a handful of mechanics to internalize and lots of fun for those who will. The strengths are represented by the accuracy of the FLESH system, which changes the approach to certain clashes, by the iconicity of many of the locations visited, by the good level of challenge and even by a cooperative that proved to be solid during our tests . On the other hand, neither the feeling of firearms nor the technical sector limited by cross-gen development have fully convinced us, but the final balance remains largely positive.
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Apr 18, 2023Dead Island 2 does not revolutionize the saga or the survival game, but provides the essentials. Dambuster Studios offers fans of zombie survivalism a bloody and sunny journey to the heart of a red-painted City of Angels. Mutilating the emaciated has never been so brutal and the pleasure felt so visceral. This FPS is not perfect, far from it, and suffers from a certain repetitiveness that it tries to erase with undeniable generosity. The Dead Island franchise is well and truly back, a resounding return through the front door.
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Apr 18, 2023With Dead Island 2’s development history it is a very pleasant surprise to see the game release in as complete and stable of a state as it is. It ran flawlessly on Xbox Series X and looked beautiful to boot, especially its incredible new gore system. While it may not deliver the interesting stories or new concepts of its genre contemporaries, its sharp humor and satisfying combat helps make up for it.
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Apr 18, 2023Dead Island 2 manages to stand out in a saturated zombie game scene by approaching the genre from an angle of pure and unadulterated fun, and succeeds at doing so. The arsenal is effective, the game world is a perpetual playground, and the zombies are as much an obstacle as they are a way to blow off steam. The recipe is effective enough to overlook the game's limitations and have a great time swimming in gore.
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Apr 18, 2023Even the reversion of the melee controls from the original didn’t make me like this game any less and for those of us who have been waiting for the sequel since it was announced in that now classic trailer, Dead Island 2 delivers on the promise and provides and fun, sunny jaunt in a zombie filled ‘HELL-A’ that is an absolute blast with friends but also fun in solo.
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Apr 26, 2023Dead Island 2 is pure fun. We are satisfied after completing the long-awaited sequel. Few risks in a game that offers what fans of the genre demand.
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May 1, 2023Dead Island 2 manages to surprise by proving to be solid and, above all, fun, thanks to an excellent co-op segment and a great dismemberment system. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said at the narrative level, and the gameplay suffers from excessive repetitiveness, but it still remains a worthy zombie game for fans of the genre.
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Apr 19, 2023Dead Island 2 is not a bad game, nor is it the Holy Grail of zombie-themed action games. It is a fun game but it makes evident its lack of creativity and the limitations that were surely a necessity to get the project out of the hell it was in.
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Apr 18, 2023Dead Island 2 does leave you wanting more, in a good way. The simple combat is endlessly engaging and gory, thanks to the physics, the weight of each hit, and the next-level destruction that lets you shoot holes through zombies or leave a wound right where your blade struck. In co-op, it’s a blast and funny in ways that watching classic b-movies with friends that feature over-the-top violence. In the end, there’s enough here to make us want Dead Island 3. Here’s hoping we don’t need to wait ten years for the next one.
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Apr 18, 2023Dead Island 2 is a silly, slaughter-filled take on the zombie apocalypse that is very entertaining without pushing the envelope of game design beyond the expected. HELL-A is the perfect bright setting to soak the streets in blood, and the little visual details ensure that there's always something eye-catching that grabs your attention. Some of the objectives can get repetitive and combat itself could use a little bit more variety, but considering its painfully long development time, Dead Island 2 still makes for a satisfying adventure with a good sense of humour stitching together its various generic zombie parts into something worth celebrating.
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Apr 18, 2023Dead Island 2 offers plenty of over-the-top zombie-killing fun, especially in co-op, but it's dragged down by serious technical problems.
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Apr 18, 2023Dead Island 2 does a great job of reanimating this dormant zombie-battling series, with the gore-filled combat and excessive weaponry that goes well with the oversaturated LA setting. It’s an enjoyable romp, but at the same time, ironically feels like it's playing it safe.
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Apr 18, 2023Dead Island 2 may not always make full use of its promising setting, but it may be the most fun I've had killing zombies in quite some time. The combat is deliriously fulfilling and will likely be further heightened in co-op when players can ping-pong zombies off of each other with their drop kicks or whatever other hijinks the community can come up with. It's an artful display of zombie violence and mayhem, which is an achievement in of itself given how saturated this genre is this many years after the first Dead Island.
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Apr 18, 2023For a game in development for more than a decade, it's a minor miracle for Dead Island 2 to come out at all. The fact that it's arrived in such a state that players can have fun with it for the duration of its story and beyond--even as that story itself is an afterthought--is a testament to the team that got it to a once-unlikely finish line. Along with the lackluster story, poor gunplay and some balancing issues hurt Dead Island 2, but its deep melee combat systems and rich setting make it a better game than the original, which is maybe the most important thing I can say about it after everything it's been through.
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Apr 18, 2023The fact that Dead Island 2 is finally here and enjoyable to play is nothing short of a miracle given the game's 10+ year development cycle. We feared this one may end up being a real mess, but Dambuster has largely delivered on what you'd expect from a sequel to Dead Island - just not much more than that. We'd have loved to see the team expand on things a little more to fully capitalise on the game's absurdity, but a safe sequel will do just fine in this case. Dead Island 2 won't blow you way, but it's shiny and dumb and fun, and definitely worth a play if you're looking for a light hearted zombie romp on Xbox.
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Apr 18, 2023Dead Island 2 is an entertaining adventure, especially if you have someone to play co-op with. It's meaty, it's long, and at times it's really neat. A sort of odd and digital Los Angeles vacation, if you will. But it's also so faithful to the original that it's almost completely void of surprises and feels structurally old.
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Apr 24, 2023Basically, a lot of it feels like a game from 10 years ago, when all of the many, many other games in the genre didn't yet exist in their modern form (...) Dead Island 2 exists, it looks nice and the zombies pop in a satisfying way. Maybe that's all the boxes this game ever needed to tick.
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Apr 18, 2023Sure, if you want to hook up with a friend and bash some skulls in, you can do that here and even have a great time marveling at the impressive gore system. But stick around for more than a few hours and you might find yourself wondering if spending thirty minutes digging through trash to make your baseball bat do five more damage was a mistake.
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Apr 18, 2023After a decade of troubled development, Dead Island 2 fails to offer anything new or substantive. Its middling melee combat, nonsensical story, and awkward dialogue choices all make playing it a slog, and even at its very best, it fails to rise above being merely inoffensive. It may be pretty, but that's not enough to save it from being a dull experience from start to finish.
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Apr 18, 2023What’s on offer in Dead Island 2 isn’t broken or flagrantly bad... but it is tired, antiquated and bland.
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| This publication has not posted a final review score yet. | |
| These unscored reviews do not factor into the Metascore calculation. | |
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Apr 19, 2023In spite of its arduous development, which gave rise to certain concerns, Dead Island 2 is a real success. The technical aspect is spot on: the quality of its landscapes and the very elaborate atmosphere of its ten explorable zones often make for quite a pleasant surprise. The whole thing is wrapped up in an effective narrative that keeps you on the edge of your seat and its well-written secondary characters are the icing on the cake. The title unveils more and more layers throughout its adventure and is filled with good ideas, thus captivating us for the twenty hours it takes to complete it. Of course, the game remains quite standard in its approach and does not revolutionise the genre. Yet, how pleasant can it be to slaughter and butcher hordes of undead foes under the blazing Los Angeles sun. The gameplay is rich and varied, offering many different weapons to play with, while giving free rein to our creativity. Fans of zombie games, go for it! You will not regret it.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 75 out of 102
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Mixed: 13 out of 102
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Negative: 14 out of 102
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Apr 23, 2023Better than the first Dead Island. If you like zombie games you will love this game.
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Apr 22, 2023
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May 24, 2023