As much as I loved the semi-open world exploration and questlines in Dead Island 2’s base game, I’ve always felt like it was missing an experience that truly put its brutal, gory combat and wild weapon crafting and upgrading on a pedestal. Well, it just showed off its upcoming Neighborhood Watch horde mode for the first time, and I think this might well be it. The mode will be arriving soon in a huge update – the release of which coincides with a new Ultimate Edition of the game.
Dead Island 2’s Neighborhood Watch was unveiled a few weeks ago with a blog post that gave some early details on a horde mode that weaved in a strategic, tower defense-style element. Each run of Neighborhood Watch lasts five days – for the first four, you complete objectives and slay zombies to unlock as many desirable weapons, traps, and defensive gear as possible. On the fifth day, you combine everything you’ve earned to set up the ultimate defenses as an enormous, relentless swarm of zombies attempts to topple your base.
In the zombie game’s latest trailer, you can see this in action, and if I’m being honest, it looks really great. This is exactly the kind of co-op experience Dead Island 2 needed – a bit of strategy and communication is needed, but ultimately it rewards you for having the best weapons and gear for turning as many zombies as possible into a smoothie.
There’s even new characters with specific skill and ability trees that have been designed just for this mode. Dambuster Studios could have taken the easy route here and just recycled the lineup of slayers from the campaign, but no – we’ve got three fresh faces and bespoke classes. There’s Dez, a chemist with toxic gas traps and a grenade launcher; Rav, a medic with deployable healing stations and a massive bone saw on a hockey stick as his signature weapon; and there’s Bozzy, who wields a crossbow and has a gear item called the “Spicy Meat-Stick.” Nice.
It’s even set in a brand new location depicting LA’s Venice Canals. Again, Dambusters could have reused existing locations here, but it didn’t, and I couldn’t be happier about it.
Dead Island 2 Neighborhood Watch launches as part of Patch 6, a free update to the game that lands on Tuesday, October 22.
Alongside Neighborhood Watch, Patch 6 is also adding New Game Plus so that you can replay the campaign with a new level of challenge.
Also releasing with Patch 6 is a new Ultimate Edition of Dead Island 2. This bundles together the base game, its two DLCs, and a bunch of exclusive cosmetic items. Surprisingly, these cosmetics include a katana themed around the upcoming medieval RPG Kingdom Come Deliverance 2. Of course, both games are published by Deep Silver, so the crossover isn’t totally out of the blue. However, I certainly didn’t expect Dead Island 2 to be a vehicle for promoting it ahead of the Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 release date.
While you wait for Patch 6 to elevate Dead Island 2 even more, check out some other excellent FPS games and co-op games that you can dive into right now.
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