Dead Island 2 Lets You Kill Zombies With Alexa
Dead Island 2 has been a long time coming, and all we can do now is get excited about what lies ahead - trying to ignore what happened to Duke Nukem Forever when it floated in development hell for a decade.
The Dead Island series is one of flippant quality, but it arrived at exactly the right time to offer players a chance to hack zombies to bits with their pals.
The game went down a treat with dedicated fans, and now its sequel is officially on the way, there's a chance that it could swing back around to make co-op undead slaying a new gaming norm. The zombie hacker also appears to be packing some serious innovation.
How Does Alex Work In Dead Island 2?
In the most recent Dead Island 2 showcase, we got a small look at how the curious Alexa Game Control will work in tandem with the game, and it looks like a pretty simple affair.
For this version of the zombie apocalypse, the game is shown to react to players attempting to goad zombies to grab their attention, as well as "get me my axe" and "time to go loco," which activates some kind of rage mode.
It definitely looks interesting, while Dead Island 2's cross-promotion with Amazon is probably a pretty weird hill to die on when it comes to the historical promotion of the Dead Island series - but this isn't actually the first time we've had voice commands in gaming.
Voice Commands In Gaming Are Iffy At Best
It's fascinating to see Dead Island 2 offer so much airtime to the feature, especially as voice controls in video games are a little all over the place.
The early days of Hey You Pikachu and Seaman might not have been responsive every time, but they still seemed to perform better than later attempts. Tom Clancy's EndWar notoriously tried and failed to make voice commands work for Xbox players using the Kinect.
To require an Alexa to make these features work on top of the general difficulty of making it work in the first place makes this a bit of a gamble - but hey, Dead Island 2 is coming out a decade after development started, so what's more of a gamble than that?
