Dead Island 2received a humorous live-action trailer that focuses on a fairly niche feature, revealing that the upcoming action RPG will ship with support for voice commands powered by Amazon’s Alexa assistant. The functionality—called Alexa Game Control—was detailed shortly after publisher Deep Silver shared its latestDead Island 2trailer showing off open-world Los Angelesand a variety of new gameplay footage.
The thirdDead Islandgame spent much of the last decade in development hell, changing studios on two occasions and even bankrupting its original developer Yager Productions, a subsidiary of the still-operational Yager Development. In 2019, the troubled project ended up with Nottingham-based Dambuster Studios, a Deep Silver unit established from the remnants of its 2014 Crytek UK acquisition. While the game was hit with yet another postponement in November, Dambuster remains confident that it’s close to wrapping up development by early 2023, whereas many fans are agreeing that the latestDead Island 2delay is probably for the best.
RELATED:Dead Island 2 Has Been Delayed
In the meantime, the latest wave of promotional materials forDead Island 2revealed that the upcoming title will soon join the still-growinglist of games playable with an Amazon Alexa. Its Alexa Game Control feature will hence allow fans to perform a variety of in-game actions by dictating them to the digital assistant. Among other things, players will be able to call up their map, swap weapons, and even draw the attention of zombies by simply hollering at the undead.
Alexa voice controls will only be available to players in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada, as per the description of the newly shared trailer. While it’s not surprising that thisDead Island 2featureis being limited to English-speaking territories that are already covered by the Alexa ecosystem, most countries fitting that criteria actually haven’t made the cut. Some of the most obvious omissions include Ireland, India, Australia, and New Zealand.
The limited social media reactions to the Alexa Game Control trailer forDead Island 2appear to be lukewarm, with most fans who commented on the feature on YouTube and Twitter likening it to a humorous gag at best and a harmless gimmick at worst. Since YouTube is no longer publicly displaying the number of video dislikes as of November 2021, it’s impossible to tell the exact portion of the audience that disliked the trailer.
On the other hand, the video’s like ratio approached 4% within the first 24 hours, which is a fairly decent figure for a game promo, especially one focused on something as esoteric as ARPG voice commands. For comparison, the well-received November teaser for Konami’sSilent Hill 2remake had a 3.7% like ratio as of December 7.
Dead Island 2is coming to PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S on Jul 01, 2025.
