20 Million Gamers Have Punched Zombies in Dead Island 2; Part 3 in The Works
- Dead Island 2 has hit 20 million players since launch.
- Dead Island 3 is officially in development with the same studio as the sequel.
- The franchise has been on life support for a while, but Dead Island 2 revived it with updates and DLC.
Publishers Deep Silver and developers Dambuster Studios have announced that Dead Island 2 has now exceeded 20 million players worldwide across all platforms. Not only that, but part three is now in the works.
Dead Island 2 is, like the original game, a first-person melee horror title. It launched in 2023 and drops players into a Los Angeles “Zompocalyse,” armed with whatever they can get their hands on – from sledgehammers to electric katanas.
“Fourteen years after players first set foot on the blood-soaked shores of Banoi, Dead Island 2 has now drawn in over 20 million Slayers worldwide to unleash mayhem in the sun-drenched chaos of Hell-A,” the companies said in a joint press release.
“This is far from the end of the Zompocalypse though. Dambuster Studios has confirmed, today, that the team is already hard at work on the next chapter in the Dead Island saga, keeping details tightly under wraps for now. Fans can rest assured, though, the outbreak is far from over.”
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A Walking Dead Tour of LA
Dead Island 2 takes place in a virus-ravaged version of LA, with plenty of references to culture and locations in La La Land. These range from the broad (helping a social influencer gain more clout by killing zombies) through to the specific (the Santa Monica Pier features as a CDC base).
Players are a Slayer, who’s immune to the virus and the survivor of a plane crash in the Hollywood Hills. There are six different characters to choose from, each with their own special skills that range from being able to dish out a lot of damage to enhanced athletic abilities. The main plot sees the player navigate Hell-A, and its hordes of mutated undead.
As with the first game, these appear as meathead brawlers, chunky vomiters, and terrifying screamers. Part two adds Mutators, which are super powerful apex zombies, and Rioters, which can use a shield.
Dead Island 2 has seen quite a few updates in the two years since its release, including a co-op Horde mode, and a New Game Plus mode that remixes enemy encounters and throws in new, deadly zombies with bone spikes for hands. It’s also received multiple DLC, including a crossover with Kingdom Come: Deliverance II that lets players use two hefty weapons from the medieval RPG.
You Got Zombies in my [Insert Genre] Game!
The Dead Island franchise has had its share of bumps along the road, making the sequel’s 20 million player count even more impressive. The first game drew praise for its cinematic reveal trailer in 2011, although some people were put off by the zombie child in it. Gamers were then surprised to find a chaotic first-person brawler rather than a nuanced RPG, as the trailer suggested.
Even so, the first game went on to receive decent praise for its meaty melee combat and overall different spin on the zombie survival genre. A spin-off, Escape Dead Island, was released in 2014 and changed the gameplay to a survival horror third-person stealth action title. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many critics found the combination of genres diluted the game and turned it into a failed attempt at something different.
A short-lived MOBA game, Dead Island Epidemic, was released in December 2014 but shut down in October 2015. Deep Silver announced this in a post on the game’s Steam page but didn’t elaborate as to why it was ceasing development, although it’s probably fair to say that a lack of exposure and low player numbers played a big part.
Deep Silver wasn’t done with the franchise there, though. 2016 saw the release of Dead Island: Retro Revenge, a 16-bit arcade brawler that’s still receiving negative player reviews calling it out for “bullshittery” difficulty and “playing like an auto-runner.”
Maybe the publisher thought it could course-correct by releasing another first-person action game in the series in 2019, but this attempt, Riptide, didn’t get off to the most auspicious start. It received a ton of negative press thanks to Deep Silver revealing a collector’s edition that included a decapitated and limbless woman’s buxom torso, clad in a Union Jack bikini.
Dying Island, Dead Light
It might not come as a surprise to find out almost every version of Dead Island has been developed by a different studio. Dambuster Studios handled the second and is working on the third, but the franchise was kicked off by Techland (which also made Riptide).
Dambuster Studios is a UK developer that started life as Free Radical Design (the Timesplitters series) before morphing into Crytek UK (Crysis) and then Dambuster. Poland-based Techland ended up refining the Dead Island idea into Dying Light, released in 2015, and is returning to this newer franchise with the imminent release of Dying Light: The Beast.
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