I never expectedDead Island 2to actually come out. It was in a weird limbo betweenSkull & BonesandHalf-Life 3, where people regularly said it was ‘in development’, but nobody believed them. That will-they-wont-they lasted nine years. I left school, left university, and got a job. Still no Dead Island 2, until last week a miracle arrived.
Dead Island 2 didn’t just come out, it even gotgood reviews.Well, okay reviews. Better than I expected, definitely. The first game was a mess and the sequel was trapped in development hell, so I wasn’t expecting much more than a broken mess, but Dambuster Studios pulled it off. In an age of safe bets and low risks, it sends a powerful message—one bad game shouldn’t spell the end of a potentially great series.
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The issue with that philosophy in the modern games industry is that everything takes so long to develop. The push for bigger and better with every single release has only dug a pit so deep that development cycles have bloated to such a size that making a sequel to a bad game isn’t worth it.Balan Wonderworldwas a flop that felt likea cheap PS2 platformerin the worst ways, only it launched on PS5—we’re never seeing a Balan Wonderworld 2. Fair, but given how clunky and obtuse the firstRatchet & Clankfelt compared to its sequel, it’s easy to see how a second chance might have been on the table if it were made a decade or so earlier.
We’ve seen this time and time again.Just Causeis bad. The gunplay is stiff, the movement actively works to hinder your progress, and the open world is empty and devoid of life. Completing objectives for a sexist American sweet talker who feels like a wannabe Chevy Chase piled on top of teeth-grinding mechanics marks the first game as little more than a terribleGTAclone. Had it ended there and never gotten a sequel, that’s what the name Just Cause would evoke—painstaking mediocrity.
Assassin’s Creedis another prime example. The first is a tediously repetitive game where we’re tasked with going from city to city to complete the same objectives over and over again. You can only use Eagle Vision at full health, combat is stiff and combos rarely click into place, while the attempt to bringPrince of Persia’sparkour to the open world often fell flat. It was a spin-off turned full game that barely lived up to its predecessors. That might’ve been its legacy, had it never gotten a sequel.
Instead, Assassin’s Creed 2 is often regarded as one of the best games in the medium, while Just Cause 2 is beloved. Ratchet & Clank is still going strong too. Yet they come from such bland beginnings. Dead Island 2 doesn’t reach similar heights, but the fact it came out is a victory in its own right. The fact it came out good is a miracle. If the first game was released today, to the reception the first game received, a sequel wouldn’t have been discussed for a second.
I can’t see many more following in Dead Island’s footsteps, but gaming wouldn’t be where it is now without sequels that iterated on mediocre beginnings, so to hell with safe bets—Balan Wonderworld, Babylon’s Fall, Forspoken, maybe we should give them one more chance.
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