

The Dambuster team likes to sell this game as a fantasy in which you are a “thriver, not a survivor”. We’re trying not to take ourselves too seriously, and I think we’ve struck a pretty good balance between the tech and the tone.” We want to make sure that the tone of the game is complementary to the gore – and it’s all done with a wink to the camera, really. Dambuster is aware of that, and has tried to make the whole game so cartoonishly gruesome that there’s a clear differentiation between its own brand of butchery and that you’d see in, God forbid, the real world. You might be thinking ‘hm, this is a bit much’ – that this level of gore, dismemberment, and ultraviolence rendered this gorgeously will get in your head. Being able to cut off a zombie head, or slice off a torso with a sword… it’s just fun! It’s simple and joyous.” You can punch your fist through one of their heads. “You can take a blunt weapon and knock a zombie’s eyeballs out. “ fits with the zombie slayer feeling, right?” continues Olson. You can tell that – tasteful or not – this mutilation engine is at the core of Dead Island 2 whether you’re popping headshots at 50 meters or sinking your electrified bear claws into the neck of a nearby mega-zombie, you can see the precise and practical damage you’re causing at every beat. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. To make all that work, FLESH was a big part of the game from very early on.” “We want players to feel like they can see everything they do to these zombies every scrape, every punch, every kick… it all has this immediate feedback that is just so satisfying. So to that end, we put an unhealthy amount of time – a ridiculously unhealthy amount of time – into crafting that. “We just wanted to make sure we could the very best zombies that we could. “Zombies are at the core of this game – we’re a zombie game for zombie lovers, and an homage to anyone that enjoys the genre,” explains design director, Adam Duckett. Pour acid on it and… well, you get the picture.
#Dead island 2 xbox one review skin
Burn one, and the skin will blister and deviate as it would in real life.

Zap a shambler and the skin will appropriately – you can almost smell it cooking from the inside out. It basically means that whatever you want to do to a zombie, it responds as it should – the game’s sandbox has fire, electricity, caustic materials and other such ‘elements’ in it. That’s an acronym that stands for “fully locational evisceration system for humanoids”, apparently. The gore and the gratuitous body horror comes largely from what Dambuster is calling the FLESH system. Like Tarantino got into the ‘sugar’ and was left unsupervised with a fully paid-up Unreal Engine account. It’s not ‘realistic’ per se (though the level of detail and the way light and physics work is pretty damn close), but more grindhouse: pulpy, ultra-violent, over-the-top. Whether it’s the subdued neon lighting in a powered-down arcade softly illuminating the blade of the katana you’re holding close to your body, or the fire licking out of an axe and crisping up the skin of a zombie whose head you’ve just had a pop at, Dead Island 2 is a ravishing feast for the eyes.Ī lot of this comes down to the way that the undead respond to you and your breakable weapons: putting your fist through their eyes, skewering them with a spear, slicing off one of their limbs… everything unfolds in front of you like you imagine it should. Well, it might be, but it’s fair to say because damn this game looks good. I can tell you now that this isn’t some well-rehearsed PR drivel. I think when people get their hands on our game, they’ll see that everything has these fun little details and interesting things to see. We didn’t want to do just that – we wanted to really populate our spaces there’s things to see everywhere, there are details in everything. So many games, developers just fill them out. “We want you to get really up close and visceral in our game. “We really want this to be a sort of personal journey, right?” says art director Adam Olson as I recount studying this undead woman – watching the way the skin moved independently of her flesh, watching how she twitched, and shuffled, and wobbled as she struggled against the sand.
