Games have to have big enemies. You can stomp on Koopas' noggins all day long, but battling Bowser takes a little more effort. You might quickly dispatch Pidgeys with your starter Pokemon, but Pidgeotto could bust out Wing Attack on your unsuspecting ass. Games are designed to get more challenging as you climb the difficulty curve, and that usually means introducing bigger, stronger enemies to test your skills.
Dead Island 2does this, too. There are regular zombies you can take out with a few hacks from your machete, but there are also big enemies, called Crushers, that take longer to defeat and do big area of effect attacks by jumping up and pounding the ground. This doesn’t make a ton of sense, though, since zombies are just former people and most people aren’t muscle-monsters that are head-and-shoulders taller than everyone else.
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Well, most people aren’t. Bodybuilders are. Dead Island 2 takes place in Los Angeles and, about 10 hours into the game, you reach Venice Beach. The area is famously the home of Muscle Beach, an open air exercise center that has built a reputation as a place where elite athletes work out. It hosts multiple weightlifting competitions throughout the year, and draws in thousands of tourists eager to catch a glimpse every day.
I was charmed that Dambuster Studios made an effort to incorporate that famous aspect of Venice Beach into Dead Island 2. It’s is a breath of fresh air when you reach it. You’ve just fought through miles of dank, dirty sewer, and finally surface inside a cramped bus station. Once you make your way out of a labyrinth of buses, you emerge into a city that appears wide open and drenched in sunlight. You proceed down the street and immediately find some survivors in a building, surrounded by zombies. You defeat the zombies, close the gate, and make it to the safety of their base. Once inside, you find out that a few of the survivors are bodybuilders, decked out in bro tanks and lifting weights. During a conversation between three of the survivors, one of the guys gets grabbed through a window by a musclebound zombie who squishes his head into strawberry jam. It’s after this that one of the fit dudes mentions that the apocalypse just happened to hit during a Muscle Beach bodybuilding competition. He asks you to track down two of his friends who were turned into zombies, both of whom are big bodybuilder boys.
Dead Island 2 presents itself as a dumb game, a stupid first-person beat-em-up that’s all about reducing zombies to a pulp and not thinking too hard about any of it. But, this worldbuilding detail struck me as, subtly, quite smart. It builds out the lore of the outbreak, gives a solid explanation for an old chestnut video game trope, ties into the real-world setting, and is funny to boot.
“LA is so superficial and vapid” is a familiar take that a lot of media about the city regurgitates without much examination. But, Dead Island 2 — while being extremely light and not at all serious — has a much more specific and interesting take on the West Coast’s most famous city. By exploring so much of LA it gives itself space to dig into the weirder crevices of a place people already feel like they know. There’s more to Los Angeles than Hollywood, and that’s a great thing for Dead Island 2’s enemy roster.
