Yager, the studio behind the critically acclaimed Spec Ops: The Line, has released the first gameplay footage of Dead Island 2, its open world follow-up to Techland’s zombie-slaughtering. loot-driven RPGs, Dead Island and Dead Island: Riptide. The game follows a new set of zombie-immune protagonists — Beserker, Bishop, Hunter, and Speeder — as they hack, slash, blast, and burn their way through a quarantined California. The sunny sandbox will be open for up to eight players to compete, collaborate, or simply coexist.
The trailer is non-stop zombicide, showing off the wide variety of weapons that will be at your disposal to destroy the undead just how you want to. Mechanically the game introduces dual-wielding, which opens up a combinatorially wide space of tactical options as you can pair one-handed melee weapons with one-handed projectiles.
Related: Dead Island: Riptide is a rough-edged sandbox that doesn’t go far enough (review)
For instance, you can freeze a zombie with a frost gun and then shatter them with a wrench. In practice it looks similar to BioShock’s system of exploring combos between Vigors/Plasmids and weapons. You will also be able to cobble together weapons from found objects in the world, crafting electrified crossbow bolts that chain lighting between nearby zombies, or what looks like a whirling outboard motor with handles.
As this is the developer’s first outing with the franchise, we have a lot of questions. Open world multiplayer zombie survival with loot gathering and item crafting worked well enough in the previous games, but how can Yager innovate?
The studio have proven itself as more than capable of breathing surprising life into another over-iterated genre, as we saw in its contemporary military shooter Spec Ops: The Line, so we are cautiously optimistic about what the team — a new group, it should be mentioned — can bring to zombies. Dead Island 2 arrives in spring 2015 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. The developer will be sharing more gameplay and story details at Gamescom 2014.
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.