Long-awaited Dead Island 2 reveals headlines Gamescom announcement frenzy

Eight years after the public announcement, Dead Island 2 finally looks like a video game — and the bloody, polished gameplay reveal capped off a lengthy Gamescom opening night presentation of video game trailers and announcements.

The open-world zombie survival game, as developed by British game studio Dambuster, also got a fixed release date of February 2, 2023, on current and previous-generation consoles and Windows PCs (via Epic Games Store). It uproots the series from the island’s origins to a zombie-ravaged version of Los Angeles (or, as the trailer calls it, “Hell-A”). The gameplay reveal for this melee-focused first-person game is so ripe with detailed facial animations, massive open-world environments, and gory amputations that we wonder how it’ll scale to the Xbox One’s hardware. Still, the trailer does a good job of emphasizing humor, conflict, and solid voice acting, which is perhaps the production value spark this game needs to set itself apart from so many video games about open worlds, zombies, and gory combat.

Gamecom’s event had no unifying concept beyond “game studios paying for premium placement,” so the rest of this article will highlight the event’s unveiled games that stood out, either because they followed up on previously anticipated games or under the impression were like new plagues of gaming fun ahead.

Return to Monkey IslandThe release date has been confirmed, and it’s coming up soon: September 19th, better known as International Talk Like A Pirate Day. The news was brought by longtime series huckster Stan S. Stanman, who returned this week as an over-the-top marketing guru, announcing that anyone who pre-orders the game would receive a “horse armor” item. The news clarified that this item does nothing but occupy a place in your inventory, without any impact on gameplay or puzzles. The trailer also featured a look at various in-game locations, as they will appear in real gameplay, and they gave us optimism about the art direction of the sequel.

Renowned fantasy author Brandon Sanderson confirmed his collaboration with the creators of Subnautics to build the “extended sci-fi universe” of the new game moonbreaker. But there is no survival system here in the open world. Instead of, moonbreaker is a turn-based miniatures tactics game that looks like a more accessible twist on table classic warhammer. Perhaps the coolest feature featured this week is free access to a “paint your minis” toolset, allowing players to invest in customizing digital figures without having to buy DLC. The new game’s Steam Early Access period will begin on September 29 and will be preceded by “one or two” free preview opportunities before the game launches for a fee.

Sega used this week’s Gamescom stage to lock down its upcoming open-world game Sonic Limits until a release date of November 8. This comes despite our reservations about the demo we played at Summer Games Fest, a bit undercooked and buggy, but Sega is confident the final game is good, or we’ll be in for a doozy in a few months. game . Anyway, today’s demo showed off a few new, desolate biomes, a new villain, and a few new oversized bosses, along with clearer shots of the retro-minded side-scrolling zones that impressed in the demo we played earlier. .

New stories from the border countries, which comes out on October 21, looks set to ramp up the production values ​​of the former Telltale-led story-adventure series. While we didn’t see if the game’s conversation sequences and dialogue choices would resemble the 2014 original, this sequel’s action and comedy sequences were packed with upgrades in production values ​​and cinematography. Thankfully, they also feature interesting new characters rather than over-reliance on Claptrap from the series, which seems like a good sign.

As for the official Telltale games, the company’s upcoming narrative adventure, The Expanse: A Meaningful Series, was announced with a summer 2023 launch window, along with a look at the pre-alpha gameplay. The vague revelation suggests that at least one major sequence will revolve around finding clues in an abandoned, tidy spaceship to figure out what went wrong. Even if this is a run-of-the-mill video game experience, we at Ars Technica generally swallow all the explorations of the realms expanse universe of sci-fi stories, so we’re looking forward to more on this.