Creaky Corpse have announced that Dead Frontier 2 will arrive on 31 August 2018. The zombie mower simulator has also received a new trailer that features several cut-up-and-mixed gameplay sequences, with both positive and worrying frames.
Technically, this is not an official release date, it is when Dead Frontier 2 will become available in Early Access on Steam. This also means that there is no console version available nor in development at the moment.
According to Creaky Corpse, Dead Frontier 2 will be an "online survival horror at its darkest", but it remains to be seen whether it refers to dark environments or an attempt at scaring the players in order to fulfil a "horror" game's purpose. The latter will definitely be rather hard to accomplish, as zombies are a pretty worn out form of horror.
One interesting part is that the developers are advertising Dead Frontier 2 as a survival game as well, which could potentially make it a completely online zombie survival game with player interaction that is not as hardcore as DayZ. State of Decay 2 attempted to do this, but it's awfully silent on Microsoft's front, not even two months after its release.
Some of the features listed on Steam include a mention that players should conserve ammo and "make every shot count" which hints at resource sparsity, something that's been unfortunately absent from every zombie game post 1999. That is, if Creaky Corpse manage to pull it off and it's not just an empty promise.
Meanwhile, the combat sequences shown in the trailer give us a glimpse of potentially detrimental combat mechanics. For example, the field of view seems to be unnecessarily limited when zooming in, even though it's not great to begin with. The trailer shows many combat situations in close quarters where players attempt to aim at zombies, at which point the camera gets zoomed in as if the player had a 2x scope attached to their eyes.
Creaky Corpse Ltd
The limited field of view could potentially serve as a tool for "enhancing" the horror by either making players claustrophobic or intentionally blocking parts of the screen for potential jump scares. Whatever the case, players have seen it several times by now and are unlikely to get frightened. Then again, there isn't enough evidence to draw any factual conclusions yet but we will know better when Dead Frontier 2 kicks off Early Access.
