The game sticks close to the formula of the original. You play a hardy survivor in the middle of a zombie apocalypse—this time in sunny LA, rather than a tropical island—and have to battle your way through the hordes, primarily via the art of first-person melee combat with a variety of improbably jury-rigged weapons. It’s fully playable in co-op, though in my singleplayer-only preview I didn’t feel I was at a disadvantage on my own, so solo players can be at ease.

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I think what will surprise a lot of people is that Dead Island 2 is not an open world, it’s a linear adventure. Though you do travel back and forth through LA, the game’s version of the city is basically a corridor of zones separated by loading screens, full of roads and lanes that make the area look bigger but are actually blocked off. And it doesn’t seem particularly long—that first third took about five hours, which suggests a full playthrough will be about 15 hours, maybe 20 with sidequests. 

I’m not someone who wants every game to be a 100 hour epic, but Dead Island 2 doesn’t make up for that small scale with variety or cleverness—it’s a pretty basic game of zombie-whacking. A humble scope was probably a sensible choice for finally getting this game out the door, but it is still being sold at a premium price, and it’s hard to escape the fact that you could get Dying Light 2 instead for the same cost.

That’s really the shadow hanging over the entire game—in the time since its original announcement, we’ve had two hugely successful Dying Light games, created by Dead Island’s original developer and carrying the spirit of that game into a series with far greater scope. Even putting aside their open worlds, they’ve introduced a full parkour system, an engaging day-night cycle, and more—things that expand on the formula and give it a stronger identity. What does Dead Island 2 bring to the table in a world where Dying Light 1 and 2 are not only available but still receiving active and enthusiastic post-launch support? 

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The vision seems to be that Dead Island 2’s focus is the pure fun of its zombie battles. Slow, predictable, and fair game to maim and torture with a clean conscience, zombies are a foe to be played with, and the game leans into that with a combat system full of toys. Jerry cans of oil are littered liberally around, ready to be used as explosives or fuel for flaming traps, and you can even create a flammable trail for more elaborate schemes. When fires get out of control, you can douse them with water—and then electrify that water to stun anyone who walks into it. The zombies are dumb enough to simply shamble into whatever mess you create, and recharging throwable bait makes it even easier to direct them around. Add craftable elemental weapons into the mix, and it’s pleasingly easy to get things burning, electrified, or dissolving in acid. 

Further grimy texture comes with the ability to chop off zombie limbs. An agile Runner is much less zippy without legs; a hulking Crusher’s attacks are more limited with its arms disabled. Certainly not a new idea—it goes right back to the original game—but credit does have to be given for easily the most impressive and gruesome gore system I’ve ever seen. Zombies come apart in frighteningly convincing layers of skin, fat, muscle, and bone; when slain, they can be chopped in half at any angle through the body; and you can even expose their jiggling brains in their skulls with a blow to the head. It’s a really striking technical achievement—though convincing enough that it’s very possible it’ll make you genuinely queasy.

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All together it does make for a decently layered combat system, even if none of the individual elements are necessarily that original. When it works, it is fun, at least at first—a kind of controlled chaos that makes you feel smart even though your opponents literally don’t have functional brains. But way too often, it simply fails to gel—and when the game doesn’t really have anything else to hang its hook on, it can be really deflating. 

The problem, really, is that overall structure. In an open world, where you’re free to pick your battles, it could’ve come together into a Dead Rising-style playground—one where when a plan doesn’t work out, you can just leg it. But Dead Island 2’s campaign is all about penning you in—if you’re not fighting in cramped rooms and corridors, you’re at least within garden fences or on a narrow street. It gives you precious little space to experiment, and more often than not forces you to clean out all the zombies in front of you to progress. Trying to get the most out of these boxy encounters is often more stressful than exciting, and when things don’t work out, you’re too frequently just backed into a corner swinging. 

Unfortunately the moment when things do collapse into the basic rhythm of light attacks, heavy attacks, and dodges, is the moment you realise that a gaggle of zombies just isn’t a fun set of adversaries for a duel. Their stumbling attacks are awkward to judge for the timing of dodge-counters and parries, and the first-person view makes it difficult to manage more than one or two at a time without running around them like a loon.

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Special zombies stretch this to the limit with their overly high health pools—taking down a Crusher can take a desperately long time, and usually the game will keep respawning lesser zombies until you defeat it, making any attempts to clear the room futile. The game’s first big, climactic moment is to literally lock you in a small room with one, with its friends endlessly crawling out of vents to join it, and the resulting tedious encounter is sadly a strong sign of things to come. 

A layer of RPG-like bonuses, in the form of unlockable cards placed in limited slots, seems to be an attempt to elevate the experience, but it’s largely too subtle to really change things up. Cards that do make a big impact are frustratingly restricted—for example, you can either have the ability to dodge, or to block, you can’t have both active at the same time. Similarly, the roster of six playable characters, each with their own built-in passive bonuses, seems to be a gesture towards replayability—perhaps to compensate for the short length of the game—but the content is already too repetitive to make that an appealing prospect.

When that core melee experience starts to fall apart, the sad truth is there isn’t really anything else to sink your teeth into. The city looks nice enough, but feels much less distinctive than the first game’s tropical resort, and while it has a bit of fun with the Hollywood theme—one memorable sequence has you fighting zombies across b-movie film sets—it doesn’t take it anywhere original, at least not in this first third.

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The story is similarly half-baked—it barely bothers to set up the circumstances of its zombie apocalypse, and its tale of survivors trying to make it out of the city feels by the numbers. In its opening scene, it seems poised to be a biting satire of vacuous celebrity culture, as you’re introduced to a self-centred actress and her lackey assistant with them abandoning you and other injured victims in the wreckage of a plane crash. But it quickly turns out these two are your new best mates, and I spent the whole of my five hours as their dogsbody, running errands for them and other celebrities. 

Any emotional weight it aims at comes in trying to make these pretty obnoxious archetypes sympathetic, including a truly baffling throughline about the actress reconciling with her ex-boyfriend. I should mention, her ex-boyfriend is Sam B, the ridiculous rapper character from the first Dead Island who sang ‘Who Do You Voodoo?’. Yeah. If you played that first game and were left curious about his dating history, then boy do I have a game for you. 

Dead Island 2 feels like it’s come out of the trials and tribulations of its long development humbled and a little lost. I applaud Dambuster Studios for transforming the seemingly doomed project into something actually releasable, and even in some ways impressive—the gore tech particularly is a genuine achievement. But that doesn’t make it a good value proposition for players. As a full-priced game, it’s uninspired and too quick to wear out its welcome—but worse, it simply doesn’t have a reason to exist in a gaming world that’s long moved past its predecessor.

30 days ago, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive broke its all-time record for concurrent players like the boss it is (opens in new tab). This iteration of the game is eleven years old, while Counter-Strike itself has been around since 1999. Barely one month on, CS:GO has just done it again: This weekend it reached a new peak of 1.4 million concurrent players.

The previous record was 1.32 million in February 2023. The new record was reached on Saturday March 11 at 13:00 UTC, per SteamDB (opens in new tab), and is 1,420,183 players at once. This type of sustained growth so far from the game’s release is remarkable and, while many have been theorising about why now, any answer eventually ends up back at the game’s rock -fundamentals. When Valorant came out I thought this might be the game to tempt me away from CS:GO. That didn’t last.

The design guide for modern power supplies has been updated to recommend just one type of cable plug for graphics cards. It’s now recommended that the 12VHPWR connector capable of delivering up to 600W of power to a single GPU should use a plug design called 4 Spring, in a bid to reduce risk of rising temperatures.

The 12VHPWR connector is a pretty new concept in the world of PSUs, first introduced in early 2022 as a part of a wider redesign with the ATX 3.0 specification (opens in new tab). The ATX 3.0 specification is basically a how-to guide to building a modern-day PSU for manufacturers, published by Intel, and it ultimately determines how different connectors and standards are actually brought to market.

Last weeks saw the release of Dead Cells’ Return to Castlevania DLC (opens in new tab), a whip-cracking dash through decades of Castlevania history that both showcases developer Motion Twin’s feel for the series and, frankly, makes you a bit sad Konami hasn’t done anything notable with the series in nearly a decade (outside of the excellent Netflix anime).

Konami’s Tsutomu Taniguchi was the supervisor of the Return to Castlevania project, and refers to it as isekai: A fantasy sub-genre where a character suddenly finds themselves transported into a new world or setting.

“Is ‘isekai’ a buzzword? Because this is how I would define this storyline,” Taniguchi said in a new interview with IGN.  “Let’s just say that Dracula’s Castle teleported on the Beheaded’s Island and what happened on the island stays on the island.”

The collaboration got its start at 2019’s BitSummit conference in Kyoto, which Motion Twin and publisher Evil Empire attended hoping to find a partner to sell the game in Japan, before taking the chance to pitch Konami the more full-on collaboration. “Since Dead Cells had ‘respectfully stolen’ so many elements from the series already, such as: the whip, the key art with the castle, the food hidden in walls… […] the pitch quickly turned into a full DLC proposition,” said Evil Empire’s Benjamin Laulan.

“When Evil Empire and Motion Twin came back with their full-DLC proposition instead of just this short featuring [initially plans were less ambitious] we weren’t really surprised and we were hoping for that to be honest,” said Konami’s Taniguchi. “And we just thought we had to let them go full circle, because we knew they would use every ounce of their talent to honor the franchise. And also, I personally admit I just really wanted to see what a fight against Dracula in Dead Cells would look like!”

As for the obvious question, Taniguchi dances around it a little, referring to the Castlevania Anniversary Collection and the Castlevania Advance Collection of older titles, as well as various mobile and console re-releases. But come on. “We know that our fans always want more, and we do too, so this opportunity to have this amazing crossover with Dead Cells was impossible to pass up on,” said Taniguchi, alongside referencing the “excitement and enthusiasm of the fans online” being “really motivating for [Konami].”

OK and… and…?!? I’m not going to say Taniguchi turned into a bat and flew out of the window, but he may as well have. Everything has to be taken in context however and Konami, one senses, is slowly feeling its way back into the various series it’s left alone for too long. The publisher did recently surprise with its renewed commitment to Silent Hill (a Silent Hill 2 remake (opens in new tab), a new title set in 1960s Japan (opens in new tab), and Silent Hill Townfall (opens in new tab) from NoCode), while rumours of Metal Gear remasters have now been floating around for years.

Castlevania remains beloved, and the success of games like Dead Cells and Vampire Survivors shows the appetite for contemporary twists on its mechanics and stylings. “Fans always want more, and we do too,” said Taniguchi. Well yeah Konami. But you lot are the ones who can do something about it.

Vos calls it the Universe Coaster, and it’s not exactly a thrill a minute. As his 14-minute video (opens in new tab) explains, via Kotaku (opens in new tab), it begins with a looping coaster that runs along a long, spiral track at a speed of about a kilometer per hour. The track ends in nothing, though there is a decorative skeleton in a top hat, but the coaster doesn’t crash at this dead end.

Thanks to a slight incline cleverly placed at the start of the track, which the coaster reverses onto before it descends, RCT2 acts as if the coaster still has a winch attached when it reaches the dead end, as it must have had to back up that incline. It’s not only prevented from crashing by this invisible winch, but pulled all the way back along the track by it at the slowest speed possible.

That’s just the beginning, as Vos explains. I admit that at some point during the subsequent explanation of how the Wild Mouse coasters synchronize with each other in his setup my brain melted, slid out of my earhole, and now lives on a farm in the country where it can play with all the other brains as much as it wants. You’ll have to watch his video to see how it works.

Thanks to the changes in OpenRCT2 (opens in new tab), the open-source re-implementation of RollerCoaster Tycoon 2, it’s possible to make tracks that are even longer than this. Vos set himself the challenge of making a track that would be compatible with the older vanilla and classic versions of RCT2, however, and succeeded. You can download a version of the Universe Coaster that runs in RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 (opens in new tab), as well as one that runs in a custom build of OpenRCT2 (opens in new tab). I’m not sure why you’d want to, but you can.