Dead Island 2 is, first and foremost, a melee game. It’s about hacking zombies to death with Wolverine claws, separating their heads from their bodies with electric machetes, bashing their brains in with splintering pool cues, spilling their guts out with claymores, immolating them with fire axes, and dealing out as many other kinds of grisly damage with various sharp or blunt objects as you can imagine. At least, that has all been true for the first eight or so hours that I’ve spent with the game.
But while playing today, I got a major upgrade to my weapon wheel. A mission has you heading to a house to meet some of the members of your crew and pick up a weapons cache. When you get there, it turns out that the house's owner has been infected, and so have a few dozen other people walled up inside. You fight the horde in the house and the yard, then once they’re all dead, you head inside and gain access to your first gun.
Holding the scoped rifle in my virtual hands gave me a bizarre feeling. Over the course of my life, I’ve played hundreds of FPS games, including shooters like Half-Life 2 and Doom that make climactic moments out of handing you their distinctive weapons. But getting a new gun has rarely felt as momentous as it did in Dead Island 2. There wasn’t anything special about the gun itself — it was a plain black scoped rifle — but after having to fight up close and personal, expend stamina on heavy attacks, and get repeatedly overwhelmed by zombies who refuse to die, getting a gun felt powerful and dangerous.
The game accentuates that feeling by sending you to the house's second floor window. A moment before you were running for your life, pouring trails of gasoline, and scrounging for med packs just to take out a zombie or two. Now, from your perch on the second floor, you look down at the same backyard arena and can take out most zombies advancing toward the house with ease, firing bullets that put them down in just a couple of hits. Plus, there's an infinite cache of ammo placed right by the window so you never need to worry about your clip going dry. You've gone from slightly more powerful than your opponents, but easily overwhelmed, to godlike and, if you take them out fast enough, untouchable.
Games can imbue mechanics with a greater power and importance by holding them back, and letting you struggle for a while. In Dying Light 2 — developed by Techland, the team behind the original Dead Island — I didn't get the glider that let you soar between buildings until about 17 hours in. Both recent God of War games, meanwhile, have held back game-changing weapons until the second half of the story. Dead Island 2 is following the same principle and holding back something the player wants to make the gratification of getting it twice as sweet.
It just so happens that the thing Dead Island 2 is holding back is the single most common video game weapon. It's impressive that it makes it feel novel again.