You can change the deck to switch up your playstyle on the fly, leaving you free to experiment. Other buffs will increase stamina for well-timed dodges or set zombies on fire at the cost of your health. You can equip special moves like flying kicks, ground pounds and terrifying screams to weaken or injure any flesh-eaters nearby. As you journey through Hell-A, you'll find and unlock new cards which offer specific perks and buffs to your survivor. What really makes things interesting is the game's card-based skill system. Using mêlée weapons you find laying around, you can swing them at the undead – but with a limited stamina bar, you'll need to make your blows count. The basics of combat are, as you'd expect, fairly straightforward. You'll punch holes in faces, slice limbs and stomp heads as you fight the horde, and that's just in the early stages.

Gore has been really cranked up to show off every skin-melting, bone-crunching attack to its fullest. Walking down Venice Beach and seeing the carnage that has unfolded in the sun is a real treat – but nothing shows the care put into the visuals more than the zombies themselves. This being the home of Beverley Hills, the cast you'll meet are suitably vast and eccentric, leading to some tongue-in-cheek conversations and wacky missions involving washed-up rockstars, ageing actors, influencers and overworked interns. It's a gorgeously gruesome and beautifully brutal zombie brawler that offers a stunning look at the sunny climes of the US, while offering a challenge to create the barmiest weapons imaginable in order to take on an increasingly wild cast of zombies, and in our play-through we were pretty much hooked until the very end.Īfter surviving a harrowing plane crash in the game's opening, you'll quickly realise your character is immune to the zombie outbreak – putting you on a path to find out who can help you use this as a cure and eventually evacuate you and any friends found along the way, out of Hell-A. Thankfully, yes! While it's never going to be seen as a groundbreaking effort, Dead Island 2 is a fun-filled take on the genre and really has a lot to offer underneath its flesh.

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