The long, windy road to Dead Island 2’s release gets some good news today. First announced in 2014, the game’s development has seen its fair share of bad news. Changes in developers and countless delays are now a thing of the past.
In a tweet earlier this morning, the game’s official account announced Dead Island 2 “went gold” (this term means development for the game’s launch is officially done as the game is ready to ship). The short clip accompanying the tweet answered fans’ questions of if the game would ever release. A voice says, “absof**kinlutely” with a new release date of April 21, 2023.
Dead Island uses Los Angeles for its backdrop this go around with plenty of zombies to take out, and plenty of ways to do it.
Like the original, Dead Island 2 will feature co-op – but it’s capped at three players instead of four.
Dead Island 2 will also feature a throwback feature we haven’t seen since the Xbox Kinect days. Amazon’s Alexa Game Control is kicking off with Dead Island 2, with supposedly more games in the works to take advantage of the feature.
You’ll be able to say voice commands to attract zombies, swap weapons, bring up your map, etc. But you won’t have to say “hey Alexa” whenever you want to use it. In fact, you don’t need to have an Alexa device. All you need is a headset connected to a PC or Xbox. According to Amazon, you can set it up for push-to-talk or voice-activated.
Yeah, it’s hard to look at a feature like this and not think it’s a gimmick. We saw similar use cases with the Kinect back in the day, and look how that turned out.
Despite being announced nearly a decade ago, the current iteration of Dead Island 2 has been in development at Dambuster Studios (an internal studio of Deep Silver) since 2019. We’ll see if Dambuster Studios can deliver a solid co-op zombie romp when the game hits PC and consoles in April.