Scream at zombies with Amazon Alexa in new game

Players can use their Amazon Alexa to taunt zombies, find locations, and more in Dead Island 2.

Dead Island 2, a recently announced horror-action game where you survive on an island infested with zombies, will be the first game to feature Amazon’s Alexa Game Control.

In the Dead Island franchise, players will have to scavenge and combine items to create weapons and armour, allowing them to survive against the zombie hordes. In a first for any game, you can use your Amazon Alexa to interact in the game with your voice.

On launch, it’s been confirmed that Alexa Game Control will only be available in English in North America, but Amazon promises that additional languages and regions will be included. Furthermore, the voice feature will only be available for PC and Xbox players, but not Playstation. Other restrictions include mandatory internet access (it won’t work if you’re offline,) and the creation/use of an Amazon account.

While playing Dead Island 2, you will not need to use the wake word for Alexa (‘Hey Alexa’), so you can simply shout out commands and have them trigger a response. However, if you want to use other Alexa features, such as interacting with your smart devices, you will need to use the wake word.

You can use the Amazon Echo to order pizza and scream obscenities at zombies. Picture: Amazon

According to Amazon, you’ll be able to use Alexa to find locations and items in the game, such as asking where the nearest workbench is. You’ll also be able to taunt zombies by saying something — the example Amazon uses is “hey zombie”, which is terribly lame. Spice it up with something corny, like “boy, you smell bad” or “oh god please don’t eat me!”

Anyways, while this is the first game to use Alexa in such a manner, voice-controlled video games have been around for a little while. Many indie horror titles will automatically detect your microphone — if you talk, shout, scream, or otherwise make a noise, the game will transmit that to the enemies and have them track you down. The addition of Alexa is unique, but only time will tell how useful and interactive it actually is.

Written by Junior Miyai on behalf of GLHF.