Dead Island 2 is now on Game Pass.
Released in April 21, 2023, Dead Island 2 was under development for nine years, and went through three studios. The problems for publisher Deep Silver started when the studio behind the original game, Techland, decided to drop the franchise in favor of a fresh start with Dying Light. In hindsight, Techland was absolutely correct to move on and try something new.
Deep Silver first assigned Yager to work on the game, announcing the project in Sony’s presentation in E3 2014. A year later, Deep Silver announced Yager had been dropped, and then in 2016, Sumo Digital was announced as the new studio. Finally, in 2019, the game changed hands to Dambuster Studios, who would go on to release the final game.
By all means, it’s a miracle that Dead Island 2 exists at all. But it’s also more surprising that the title turned out OK, if not exceptional. The game received a MetaCritic of 75 on PC and 76 on Xbox Series X|S. While the game is certainly not perfect, the core gameplay loop is solid, and a definite step up from what was in the first Dead Island.
There truly must be some form of provenance for Dead Island 2 as it also achieved a modest success across PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. Similarly, Dambuster Studios is under Deep Silver, itself a part of Plaion. And Plaion was one of the first video game companies acquired by Embracer Group, all the way back in 2018. Sadly, Dambuster’s sister studio Fishlabs experienced layoffs last year. So far, there has been no news of layoffs for Dambuster, and that may be because of Dead Island 2’s success.
Dead Island 2 is the spitting image of the ideal Game Pass game. Its score isn’t high enough to guarantee a sale, but Dambuster’s game design likely interests a lot of gamers. They may not be willing to pay for the game full price, and they may not really want to have the title as part of their collection, but they would be willing to give it a try.
Game Pass owners already enjoy a core group of Xbox 1st party titles that are permanently part of the bundle. That guarantee is sweetened up by a broader library of 3rd party titles that go up on rotation, and that allows Game Pass users to try out these games, with none of the limitations of demos, and decide if they want the games permanently.
So if you’re a Game Pass subscriber, now is your chance to do that with this game and decide if you like it enough to finish it after all, and maybe even buy it for yourself. You can see Dead Island 2’s listing on Xbox Store, indicating its Game Pass status, here.
