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Dead Island 2 Is Still Worth Your Time
The best-looking Unreal Engine 4 game?
Back in 2023, I almost forgot about Dead Island 2.
I was making my usual game of the year list, and even though this incredible sequel that had somehow escaped from development hell was one of my favorite games of the year, I almost didn’t include it on the list at all. That’s not to say anything about its quality, in fact, quite the opposite. The game is so good I just felt like it had always been with me, and I had totally spaced out about how recent it was. I took its April 2023 release date and smooshed it into the nebulous nostalgia-fueled past of “good games” inside my brain, shelving it next to other action adventure greats.
I felt similarly fond toward the original Dead Island. That game was very much a product of Polish studio Techland, who would eventually go on to captivate a much larger audience with the Dying Light series. Dead Island was the genesis of those ideas, a tight little action RPG about intense first person combat, making XP bars go up, and grabbing loot. Techland has since built those concepts out into a monster of an open world game, but it started out small and simple.
The sequel had a much rougher road in development. The IP got taken away from the original developers and handed off to another team…and then…
