Dead Island 2 finally shipped after years of studio turnover — and it holds together

Dead Island 2 was announced in 2014. It shipped in 2023. Between those two dates, the project passed through three studios, and the version that finally reached Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC and Mac was made by the fourth team to touch it. That history is worth knowing before you play, because the game itself carries the marks of it — some good, some not.

Dambuster Studios and the four-studio shuffle

Deep Silver first handed the sequel to Techland, the developer of Dead Island (2011). The publisher disagreed with Techland’s creative vision, and the project moved to Yager Development, the studio behind Spec Ops: The Line. Yager’s team was small, and the scale of Dead Island 2 — plus its focus on online multiplayer — proved too much for it. Yager was removed in 2015. Sumo Digital replaced it the following year, then Dambuster Studios, an internal Deep Silver studio, took over in 2018.

Years of turnover usually produce a game with no center. Dead Island 2 mostly avoids that. Dambuster’s Los Angeles is a coherent place, and the combat has a clear point of view. But the seams show in the structure, and we will get to that.

Los Angeles, split into 10 zones

The original Dead Island dropped players onto an island. Dead Island 2 drops them into Los Angeles, sealed off by the US military under a full quarantine restricted zone after a new and stronger zombie outbreak. The choice of a city over an island is not cosmetic. Instead of one large open world, Los Angeles is split into 10 different open zones. Players can explore each zone freely, but they travel between zones through Zone Exits. Fast travel points unlock as the game progresses.

That design is a trade. It gives Dambuster tighter control over pacing and lets each zone carry its own side quests and its own zombie types. It also chops the city into pieces, and the seams between those pieces are where Dead Island 2 feels smallest. The game is set about 15 years after Dead Island and Dead Island: Riptide (2013), and the distance from the original series is deliberate — new cast, new narrative, same appetite for brutal melee action.

The Slayers, Emma Jaunt and a plane that never lands

The setup is one of the better things here. Six individuals board one of the last evacuation flights out of Los Angeles. An infected passenger turns mid-flight. The military shoots the plane down. The Slayers survive the crash, then get bitten while trying to help other survivors.

They make their way to the mansion of actress Emma Jaunt (Hannah Steele), who reluctantly shelters them despite their infection. Sam B (Cavin Cornwall), Emma’s ex-boyfriend, arrives intending to get her out of the city. He reveals he is immune, and the Slayers realize they are immune too.

That is a clean hook, and the game knows it. The immunity premise gives the player a reason to push deeper into a city everyone else is fleeing, and it does the work a health bar usually does — you are not fragile, you are wrong. It sets up Dr. Reuben Reed (Colin McFarlane), a CDC doctor whom the Slayers contact by radio and who asks them to reach his safe haven in Santa Monica to use their immunity to synthesize a cure.

Block or dodge, and the weapons that follow

Dead Island 2 is an action role-playing game played from a first-person perspective. You pick one of six playable characters, each with unique skills and abilities. Early on you choose between two defensive abilities: block or dodge. A well-timed block or dodge opens a counterattack.

Weapons split into ranged and melee, and each type divides into four categories with their own combat focus. Headhunting weapons do devastating damage to an enemy’s head. Maiming weapons tear limbs. Individual weapons carry attributes — Force governs how much stamina the character drains while swinging, Speed governs how often you can swing consecutively. Mods add elemental effects. Perks alter stats. Players can equip two throwable weapons, called Curveballs in-game, each with a short cooldown.

The series has always been about melee, and Dambuster leans into it. The procedurally generated dismemberment system creates weapon-appropriate wounds on zombies. That is the technical headline, and it earns the attention: hit a zombie with the right tool and the wound matches the tool. It is the rare gore system that reads as design rather than decoration.

Sewers, a tumor and Lola Konradt

The middle of the game has a genuine image in it. Heading through the sewers toward Santa Monica, the Slayers discover that zombie corpses the military has been dumping have melded together into a massive, tumor-like growth spreading underneath the city. It is the one piece of the plot that turns the quarantine from a backdrop into a fact about the place.

Then Lola Konradt (Pippa Winslow) and another group of survivors stop them and drop the Slayers into a pit full of zombies. The fall temporarily triggers a bestial rage in them, which they use to kill everything in the pit. It is a good beat, and it is also where the game’s momentum starts to sag — the Slayers reach Reed’s haven at a hotel, learn the military will not extract them without proof of immunity, and the quest structure settles into recovery missions.

Co-op, and the case for three players

Dead Island 2 supports solo play and three-player cooperative multiplayer. Co-op is where the combat system gets to breathe. Three Slayers with different builds, different weapons and different Curveballs turn a zone into a running argument about how to handle a swarm. Solo, the same fights are slower and the RPG math is more visible.

The game is not a large open world, and it does not pretend to be. Ten zones, Zone Exits, fast travel, side quests, unique zombie types per location. If you want the sprawl of the original, this is not it.

What 7.4 out of 10 means here

Dead Island 2 scores 7.4 out of 10. That number is the IGDB critic aggregate across six outlets, and it lands where the game does: a sequel that survived years of studio changes and came out coherent, confident and a little narrow.

The dismemberment system is the best thing Dambuster built, and it is the reason to play. The immunity premise is the best thing the writers built. The zone structure is the compromise, and it costs the game the sense of a city under quarantine — you get ten good rooms instead of one collapsing Los Angeles.

What matters most is that Dead Island 2 exists at all, and that it is not a mess. A project that lost Techland, Yager and Sumo Digital should have arrived shapeless. It arrived with a combat system that has something to say about violence and a plot that gives the player a reason to walk into it. The narrowness is real. So is the craft.

action RPG · co-op games · Dambuster Studios · Dead Island 2 · game review · zombie games