Just like the zombies that’ll presumably shamble around in it, Dead Island 2 keeps clinging on to life. Newly posted product listings for the console versions on Amazon US have shed some dying light – sorry – on the eternally-in-development horror game, first announced eight years ago at E3 2014. Here’s that infamous trailer once again, just for old times sake.
]]>Six years after announcement, and we're still no closer to knowing when Dead Island 2 will shamble our way. Somewhat unexpectedly, though, that hasn't stopped a select few from getting their hands on a playable build of the thing. Sort of. This week, a 2015 build of Dead Island 2 emerged online, with videos and screenshots revealed Yager's long-buried vision of a multiplayer blood-in-the-sun sequel.
]]>Dead Island 2 is one of my favorite trailers of all time for a game I'd all but given up on seeing. Back in 2014, the studio Yager was developing the then announced title for Deep Silver, and in 2016 the production was moved to Sumo Digital. As a reminder, it is now 2018, so Dead Island 2 and its Santa Monica-ish muder-setting seem like they have been abandoned. That is, until, Deep Silver dropped a free-to-play tower defense game called Dead Island: Survivors. The Internet has some questions about whether this mobile tie-in was taking the place of the long gestating title, and Deep Silver responded.
]]>THQ Nordic, publishers of the Darksiders games and recent jankfest Elex, have bought Koch Media, the companies have announced. Koch are the father-company of Deep Silver, who publish games like Saints Row, Metro, Dead Island, and Homefront: The Revolution. That means THQ Nordic now own alllll of those bad boys, among others. Due to all the combined plates this company now spins, they could now make a game where the hero of Mighty No. 9 fights jazzy paint-monster De Blob in a doomed bid for supremacy on Mars, aka, Red Faction 3. Although, they probably shouldn’t do that.
]]>The game trailer is a sly creature. It wants to entertain you, to excite you, to embolden you with curiousity. But it also wants to sell you a bunch of code wrapped up in some 3D shapes. Some trailers turn out to be more artful than the game they’re hawking, others plant sneaky emotions in your head with music. However, some are better than others. Here are the best conflagrations of light and noise in PC gaming.
]]>Dead Island continues to be the series that I don't hear many people asking to keep on giving, but keeps on giving nonetheless. Next up is Retro Revenge, a side-scrolling, 2D, pseudo-16-bit, cat-centric beat 'em up set in the Dead Island universe (that being "a particularly sweary zombie apocalypse and something something backwards trailers). It's out this Summer, both on its own and as part of a bundle with the first two DIs.
]]>Zombie-slaying FPS-RPG Dead Island [official site] and its 2013 expandalone Dead Island Riptide are being "remastered" in Definitive Editions - more relatively-recent games coming our way again with a new swing in their step after being prettied up for the latest consoles. Too bad someone already took the name Deathinitive Edition, huh?
Out of curiosity, I went back to see what RPS said in 2011 when Dead Island [official site] was re-announced with That Trailer. I'm almost disappointed by John's restraint. I was hoping someone would've declared it "The Citizen Kane of Game Trailers" and I'd get to be gittish to them tomorrow. Curses. Not even "The Old Yeller of Game Trailers"!
]]>Polish studio Techland may have created open-world zombie-smashing FPS-RPG Dead Island, but publishers Deep Silver got the rights. That's how come Deep Silver went on to have folk make daft things like the MOBA-y Dead Island: Epidemic and baffling drek Escape Island while Techland went on to make another open-world zombie-smashing FPS-RPG in Dying Light.
Straight-up sequel Dead Island 2 [official site] was in the works at Spec Ops: The Line devs Yager, and this one actually looked promising. But its future is now looking as safe as a lecherous, wisecracking wino in a zombie flick, as Deep Silver have announced Yager are off the game.
]]>Here is my dilemma. It’s nice, I think, to approach supporter posts with a desire to be more personal, more intimate, to shine the light on ourselves a little more brightly. Or to be even more self-indulgent than ever, if you’d prefer to think of it that way. So when considering what to write about in my weekly supporter column, I like to think about what’s going on in my life, pick a lens to look through. Except, four weeks ago my first son was born, and good grief, who wants to hear about that?
Oh my goodness, how many more games-journalists-becoming-parents can the internet cope with? And who is it for? People without kids are likely far less interested to read about an experience they don’t relate to. People who don’t want kids and never intend to have them can feel marginalised, excluded. People who want kids and haven’t yet, or those who want them and cannot have them, can find the whole topic misery-inducing. (My wife and I were trying for three years before ours came along, and I can testify that it’s really shit.) And people with kids already went through it, roll their eyes at the naivety of it, or don’t want to be reminded of it. Can the internet hold another, “How I game with my kid in my arm” article, without keeling over and just collapsing on the floor?
Let’s find out!
]]>Take one pretty fun co-op game, ladle cash over the top, then persist with sheer bloody-mindedness and you too could have yourself A Franchise. Turns out, three Dead Island games are in the works: straight-up sequel Dead Island 2, the MOBA-ish Dead Island Epidemic, and now publishers Deep Silver have announced Escape Dead Island. It's a third-person action-y sort of thing (you know, like this), with a story that makes me think of Far Cry 3 with its rich kids and trippy hallucinations.
]]>I had not particularly noted Dead Island: Epidemic's passage into Early Access. I'd seen enough games chasing the dream of League of Legends and Dota 2's success with only a few small new idea. And it had the temerity to coin its own cutesy genre name, Zombie Online Multiplayer Battle Arena! However, after watching a new gameplay trailer explain what it's up to, I'm at the very least interested. Not enough to pay for the beta of a game that'll be free-to-play at launch, mind.
While the majority of MOBAs (do I still need to explain this dreadful name?) seem to mostly duplicate LoL or Dota, Dead Island: Epidemic takes their ideas of per-match progression and slap them into something a bit more like Diablo III with a sizeable PvE side.
]]>In comparison to the original Dead Island trailer, Dead Island 2's announcement video is more honest than Abe and Cherry Tree Washington combined. You remember that trailer, right? The one that broke a thousand hearts when it debuted and then broke them again when the game was more like a first-person Dead Rising than a mourning simulator? Dead Island 2 is just holding its hands in the air and admitting to the world that it's at the dafter end of the zombie spectrum. No introspection here - it's a game about beautiful beach bodies rotting in the sun while the world points, laughs and decapitates the poor sods.
]]>You've got to get your Humble Bundles out when guests come over, haven't you. Show them the collection, that's right. They always say they enjoy looking, don't they, though they do ask why you never play any of them. They don't get get it, do they, but that's fine. You've got your collection, all tidy and shiny in those pewter frames. Those frames with a gap in the middle. That dreadful, gaping gap that creeps into your dreams and you awake screaming. The Humble Bundle you missed.
Chin up, chuck! You might catch it again. The Humble folks are running a fortnight of daily pay-what-you-want Humble Bundles--some old favourites and some new hopefuls--so fingers crossed That One That Got Away comes around again.
]]>Zombies, traditionally speaking, are slow. Not Dying Light's zombies, though. Once light dies and night falls, the shambling undead become spry as acrobats equipped with the most cutting-edge of Moon Shoes (Moon Shoes!). Except when they don't. I guess Techland is developing Dying Light in a place where it's perpetually daytime, because the parkour-infused zombo-clobberer's been delayed into 2015.
]]>Did you know that the costumes the Alliance soldiers wear in the Firefly episode The Train Job were originally used in Starship Troopers? That sort of recycling happens all the time in movies and TV. I'm a person of limited imagination, so when I first spotted Techland's Dying Light, it appeared to me that they had swathes of zombie material lying around from Dead Island and decided to reshape it into a game about free-running past the undead. I still kind of stand by that. Whatever its inception, the fleet-footed zombie dodger is coming out pretty soon, and there's a wee teaser trailer for you below.
]]>Hellraid is the next violence-mare due from the e'er unpredictable Techland stable, and it is some manner of first-person sword-stabbing game. Whether it would join the ranks of the vanishingly few effective first-person melee games was something we were due to find out in the few remaining weeks of 2013. No longer! Techland have pushed it back to next year, in the wake of mixed tester feedback. In other words, they want to make the knob bits not-knob.
]]>We haven't mentioned before now, but the current Humble Weekly Sale is a clutch of Cliffski's Positech games, which have already netted over $100k, with a day and a half to go. Beers are on Cliffski! (Just don't mention piracy.) And now a new fortnight-long Humble Bundle proper has launched, this time showcasing the products of the decidedly not indie Deep Silver. Four of their games (including Saints Row 3!) for pay what you want, two more for over the average, and the rather average Dead Island Riptide if you throw in $25.
]]>ZOMBIES ARE EVERYWHERE. In the schools, under your refrigerator, buried deep within the collective cultural conscience. Especially that last one, which is probably why a new zombie game gets announced every 0.4674 seconds. That brings us to the current undead re-deadifier du seconde: Dying Light. It comes from Techland and takes place in a balmy, bloody tropical setting, but it's not part of the Dead Island series. The main differences? Fleet-footed, Mirror's-Edge-esque parkour and a Minecraft-like survival element. Don't worry, though: you can still make an electrified machete.
]]>Dead Island: Riptide isn't just one of the most tastefully marketed games of 2013, it's also the semi-sequel to one of the best-selling games of the last couple of years. Yes, Dead Island was an absolute smash hit, because everyone wants an open-world zombie survival game. Or wanted, at least. Hmm.
Here's wot I think.
]]>Techland have announced that they are currently working on a new game, currently named "Project Hell". The game is a spin off from Dead Island, as revealed on their recent blog-post about the game, it comes out of "an internal weapon mod" for Dead Island, made by one of their own. It's a first-person "hack and slash game in a dark fantasy setting". Techland said that the mod "was a proof that chopping monsters frozen by magic spells using two-handed swords is brutally fun and addictive." We had always suspected, of course, but now we have proof. Horrible proof. It's going to be just as dark as their tropical zombie-hurter: "Our main goal is to make a game we can all enjoy playing so don’t expect unicorns and fairies – we prefer breaking through hordes of undead minions only to slaughter their devilish and loathsome masters in a bloody boss-fight."
]]>Among The Sleep's main character is two-years-old. In every culture except dog, that means he's woefully under-prepared to do anything except crawl, cry, and make everything smell horrific by proxy. So then, when the game's Internet-famous trailer threw the teetering tot into a nightmarish gauntlet of hallucinatory horrors, it provoked many a raised eyebrow. And why not? It may sound crass, but recent horror-themed games have made a rather disturbing discovery: if you want attention, put a child in a high-risk (or even fatal) situation. Just ask Dead Island's infamous trailer and Limbo. Both games ultimately received mixed reactions, but they certainly didn't go unnoticed. For Among The Sleep developer Krillbite, though, it's not a matter of drawing gasps or coaxing a single tear from your eye or potentially doing both at the same time and causing you to choke hilariously. There's a reason, after all, that this one's first-person. We're stepping into a child's feet pajamas and seeing a child's world as colored in by a child's hyper-imaginative mind. Without its main character, Among The Sleep probably wouldn't even exist.
]]>Techland's zombie game Dead Island sold especially well, so it's hardly surprising that a sequel should have appeared on the RPS long-distance radar so quickly. There's no information aside from the name and confirmation that it exists, (thanks VG247) but I sense this will please those of you who enjoyed the original tropical island undeath. Full details will appear in the summer, and I'm hoping to see more surfing zombies, perhaps some zombie scuba action?
]]>It's a frequent lament that we rarely get to play bad guys in an interesting way. There's another hope on the horizon, with the rather good Dead Island announcing some new major DLC. Ryder White is a whole new angle on the game's story, where you play as the titular character - the game's main baddie. Which is a splendid idea, if it's done right. It's a new single-player campaign, where you'll apparently get to understand White's motivations for his actions, as well as see him as a loving husband and military man. Techland say it'll be "several hours" long, and add in a couple more weapons. We've some screenshots of it below.
]]>RPS is probably the most visited website on the internet, knocking Google and YouTube into an embarrassing runner-up position. I don't have accurate data, but it was.
Meanwhile, we've just received an email letting us know that Techland's Tomasz Gawlikowski says, "Dead Island is probably the best selling new IP in this year".
]]>Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the... Oh, everyone is dead. Well, more Christmas presents for me, then! And they won't be needing these mince pies, either, which is a bit of luck, because I am strangely hungry.
]]>This year has been unusually rich in the kind of game that I most enjoy: those that are open-ended, or provide a sandbox world for me to mess about in. We usually get a couple of these every year, but in 2011 we seem to have run into a minor bounty of the open stuff, which is good news for explorers and meanderers alike. I've gone into a bit more detail about why this pleases me below.
]]>Dead Island's PC launch was a bit of a messy business, which is why we here at Fortress Shotgun gave a solemn, grim-jawed nod upon hearing that devs Techland had decided to prioritise patching it over squeaking out downloadable content. The latter was delayed in favour of the former, and today we get a peek at which of their freeform zombie game's guts they've been performing surgery on.
A few of the major fuel sources for the angry tank have been successfully identified and removed, including but not limited to: weapon duping, offline mode, savegame borking, disabling unwanted voice chat and, rather sadly, floating zombie corpses (well, re-corpses). I'll miss you, lads.
]]>When Dead Island's Bloodbath Arena DLC was announced I jested that it might be delayed 'til 2017. Well, I'm guessing we'll see it before 2017, but the content has indeed been delayed. Rather than concentrating on finishing up the horde mode and extra equipment that the DLC's set to offer, Techland are concentrating on squashing the bugs in the core game. Releasing a game with technical issues is no good thing but at least they're working to fix things, which is far more important than shipping what sounds like a fairly negligible expansion. Using my powers of sarcastic clairvoyancy, my next prediction is that the recently announced Dead Island movie, if it does ever materialise, will not in any way resemble the video below.
]]>And again! A not entirely industry-representative yet unquestionably fascinating/depressing look at what comprised the top ten PC game sales for Steam compared to UK retail over the last week. Will The Sims' dominance of retail continue unabated? (Obviously). Will there be any surprise returns to the Steam top ten? (Yeah, actually). Read on to find out the answers to both these questions and more, as long as those questions concern the chart-placing of contemporary PC games. If you want to find out the answer to what the Queen had for breakfast this morning or where Muammar Gaddafi is hiding, I really cannot recommend reading the rest of this post.
]]>The internet is littered with the rotting corpse-stories of 'game x optioned for movie', so many of such headlines failing to come true, Hollywood executives' frothing plans simply ending up mired in cinematic red tape for years to come or Uwe Boll somehow getting his hands on the license. Perhaps Dead Island is destined for a similar fate, today bringing news that Lionsgate plan to bring its foul-mouthed tale of holidayers versus zombies to the silver screen - but the hullabaloo over that trailer might sharply increase the odds of something actually happening.
]]>Time for another one of our in theory regular but in practice highly irregular comparisons of the last week's top ten best-selling PC games on Steam, and at UK retail. Obviously there are all manner of ways in which these are not fair or entirely meaningful comparisons, not least in that Steam's metrics can tend towards the cryptic, that Steam's includes pre-orders but UK retail (via Chart-Track) doesn't and that it's laughably hard to find many PC games on British high streets these days, but it's always fun/horrifying to get a flavour for the stark differences between what people are buying digitally and what plastic boxes their attention is caught by.
]]>Dead Island released today in the EU while our American cousins have been slaycationing for a few days already. Later this month, there will be more, deader bits of island in the form of the rather unhygienic Bloodbath Arena DLC. The game first showed its rotten face at E3 in 2006 and its prolonged development cycle didn’t manage to iron out all the wrinkles, though John was suitably impressed by what he played. Now that the game may finally have stumbled through the hurdles of its difficult release, maybe the DLC will have a smoother ride. Or I might be back next week to tell you it's been delayed until 2017. Details below.
]]>Dead Island was released (in some manner) in the US yesterday, and arrives in the UK, once it's painstakingly paddled across the massive oceans of the internet, on Friday. I've been playing it for a long, long time, and yet still haven't got anywhere near its ending. And as such, even though I'm about to tell you Wot I Think, in the interests of probity will offer you my Impressions.
]]>Regarding the strange derpage today, where Deep Silver seem to have somehow released the dev version of Dead Island to US Steam users, we've had a statement back. It's succinct:
]]>Gosh, here's a whoopsie. Dead Island is out now on Steam for the Americanish, except the version they've received probably isn't the one Deep Silver were hoping they'd get. It seems the dev build of the game has been put out there, rather than the official version. Complaints about a bad port, mysterious goings on, and no-clipping all seem to come down to the fact that this is the bug-testing, cheat-enabled, not-for-release version of the game. Code that people are digging up seems to reveal that this might even have far too much of the 360 version left in it. Crikey, that's a big oops. (I should note that the PC review build I'm playing certainly is optimised for PC.) A day one patch is intended to fix an impressive thirty-seven issues. Perhaps one of them will be the release of the internal debug of the game to US customers? We've contacted Deep Silver to see what's really going on.
]]>Dead Island is out tomorrow in the American States, but not until Friday for the Eurochaps. I'm playing it right now! (We'll have a WIT up in the middle of the week, to confuse everyone in all territories.) I'm also not encountering quite as many bugs as others have spotted in some of the reviews that have appeared today. But that's not stopping the appearance of a day one patch, due out tomorrow along with the game, that will fix an impressive thirty-seven issues. You can read them for your own amusement below.
]]>Just when you thought it was safe to get back out of the water, Dead Island is ready to gobble up your brains. Out September 6th in North America and on the 9th everywhere else, the game already boasts one of the most talked about trailers of the year. This latest one still has evocative (and strangely triumphant) music in the background but the foreground looks a lot more like an actual game. Along with the emphasis on co-op we've seen from previous marketing material, there’s some enemy variety on show and an urban-type environment alongside the beaches and resorts. Enjoy. We’ll have words about our experiences with the game next week, which unfortunately makes them too late to be featured on the side of a boat or plane wreck. Boo. If the trailer doesn’t contain enough zombies for you, check out this Marvel digital comic prequel to the game. That’s got some zombies in it too.
]]>Hooray! Just when things seemed really gloomy, here's comes a zombie apocalypse scenario to put things into perspective. Even if your capital city is on fire and your heroic leaders are unable to do anything but share holiday snaps, it's worth remembering that you aren't going to be eaten alive by the shambling undead. Ah, that's a nice feeling.
See: the four-player co-oping in Dead Island that we've already seen a bit of already. Consider: that it's actually not all that like Left 4 Dead. Suppose: that it might actually be fairly entertaining. Wonder: when the zombie games will end.
]]>Oftentimes with games, what you want is to gain knowledge from scratch. There's a title, a genre, and what we need is to build information upon that. With Dead Island it often feels like things are working in the opposite direction, thanks to that trailer. Everyone invented their own version of the game, and the reality can often feel like the result of chipping away at this impossible ideal. So let's scrap all that, forget the trailer since it has no real bearing on the game you play, and start getting interested from the ground up.
]]>Poor old Dead Island - it must be pretty stressful, putting out any new trailer after the frenzy around that one. Especially as they now need to show off the actual game, rather than just a conceptual short film. The E3 trailer has several elements in common with the CGI weepfest, notably slow motion, the music and a few snippets of dialogue to suggest emotional as well as gory horror, but all told I'm preeeeeeeetty sure we're looking at an all-out carnival of death.
]]>There are three reasons to like this extremely long video of Dead Island. The first is that it showcases what's starting to look like quite the fast-paced action RPG, full of numbers going up and luxurious vistas. Beautiful. The second reason is that there's a bit where the protagonist throws a baseball bat at a propane canister and it explodes instantly. Amazing. The third is that it mentions Dead Island will support four player co-op throughout the whole story. Strong!
...then again, I'm sure lots of you will take these points as reasons to dislike it. In a case of some serious false advertising, if you were expecting something bleak and horrific, you certainly won't be finding it here after all.
]]>Well, good. I've wanted a new in-game trailer for Dead Island, and now I've got one. Now I want £10m, and a speedboat. You can watch the trailer below. You can deliver the money/boat to my house.
]]>Ooh, I've got some Dead Island screenshots you can look at. But only after you've solved my riddle, completed an ARG, and pre-ordered my next book: Everyone Should Just Bloody Well Do What I Tell Them. Do it today and you'll receive one extra screenshot FOR FREE!
Or not. In fact, you can see all five of the new pics below.
]]>VG24/7's amassed what can only be described as a tableau of new Dead Island shots, and I found a few others we haven't posted yet, too. A few points of interest in these screens, including a MASSIVE zombie. Is that new? I don't know. I guess Resident Evil has had a few massive zombies in its time. Carry on!
]]>After the recent extraordinary trailer for Dead Island, it's safe to say our interests are piqued. So an interview with the developers detailing the numerous ways to slay zombies is just what we're after. Fortunately, GameTrailers did just such a thing. Unfortunately it does not offer any in-game footage, but at least there's a nice man explaining things.
]]>It's been quite a while since a trailer made me say, "Wow." And indeed since one made me gasp, "Oh my God." This CGI teaser for Dead Island - a zombie game originally announced in 2007 - is both stunning and horrendous. Bleak like your puppy dying of tiredness is bleak. The game itself sounds absolutely fascinating. An open-ended sandbox zombie survival game, first-person but with an emphasis on melee combat, where you must try to survive for as long as possible on an infested New Guinea island. We have little more to go on, other than the knowledge that Deep Silver are publishing, and that the people behind it are capable of a trailer as brilliantly morose as the one below.
]]>There's nothing actually gory or even particularly illustrative about this tech video for upcoming zombies-on-the-beach game Dead Island, but it's nevertheless... suggestive. It's always struck me as odd that so few games have chosen to go down the hyper-gore dismemberment route of Soldier Of Fortune, but perhaps Dead Island will allow us to bash the faces off zombies in a manner appropriate to they pulpy rotten-flesh consistency. It'll be like a Pinata, only with glands instead of candy...
]]>The plot of Techland's recently announced Dead Island promises a fun time: a tropical tourist resort turns into a zombie apocalypse. You, as a tourist on the package holiday to hell, must put things right and bash the horrors. It's cocktails and crowbars on the beach as you battle with decomposing partygoers. Yum.
]]>
