After years of delays, rumors, and an early leak, Dambuster Studios and Deep Silver finally revealed Dead Island 2 to the masses at Gamescom Opening Night Live 2022. The trailer reintroduced us to the game after eight years, highlighting all of the wild character builds players can create and defeat hordes of zombies with. The game also got a February 3, 2023, release date, so the wait for Dead Island 2 won’t be much longer.
Like the original, Dead Island 2 takes place in a tourist-heavy location. However, now we’ve gone from a vacation island to the City of Angels, Los Angeles. The trailer showed how players can explore and kill zombies in the various locales that Los Angeles has to offer. These areas range from high-class Beverly Hills neighborhoods to the sandy shores of Venice Beach. Six playable characters can be used to explore these different locations, and each can be highly customized to fit anyone’s liking. These characters, called “Slayers,” have fully customizable abilities that can be accessed using a brand-new skill system.
The playable avatars aren’t the only crazy builds that can be found in Dead Island 2. The game features tons of different Los Angeles-themed undead variants, many of whom we got an early look at in the trailer. Hopefully, Dead Island 2 can take what players enjoyed about the original and expand on it in exciting ways.
Dead Island 2 is set a 2023 release date of February 3 for Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and PC for $60. A day one edition containing special abilities and weapons is also confirmed to hit shelves for $70.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.