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Ten hours into my gameplay of Dead Island 2, I began to wonder if there was much point in continuing. I’m waiting for the game to introduce some new gameplay mechanic or story surprise to keep me going, or give me some kind of reason to keep going. After ten hours, I understood; if I hadn’t played this game for review, I would have stopped playing before it ended.

My biggest problem with Dead Island 2 is the loop, which isn’t a loop because it’s a flat circle. Get weapons, kill zombies, break weapons, get more weapons – wipe and repeat. It may seem like a disrespectful way to criticize a game, but in the case of Dead Island 2 the problem is that there is nothing outside of this loop to deal with it properly. The game doesn’t have an open world like people think – instead, the map is divided into 10 different areas that you can quickly travel through (later). Once you’ve completed the short main story and completed the remaining side quests, all that’s left to do is travel to one of these locations and kill endless respawning zombies until you either quit or die. when tired.

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Is killing zombies fun? Yes—at first. At the start of the game, all you have are basic skills and access to some basic melee weapons. This is the part of Dead Island 2 that I enjoyed the most, since I spent most of my time messing around with the “FLESH” system. Almost every body part a zombie has can be grasped in a visceral and powerful way, allowing you to cut off a zombie’s leg in a specific spot or pop an eyeball. with a bonk placed on the head.

As the story unfolds, this innovation quickly begins to wear off. Sending a zombie and its jaw flying in two different directions never gets old, but adding combat does little to spice things up. The cards you unlock allow you to practice certain skills, like your dodge or jump kick, and you can unlock “Curveball” throwers to help reduce the horde, but these extensions aren’t enough to provide variety.

This might be a good time to mention that Dead Island 2 doesn’t have any difficulty. While not all games need adjustable difficulty, Dead Island 2 definitely feels like it can be used – not because it’s too hard, right, but because it’s not consistent. The first third of the campaign was difficult, and I found myself constantly firing my melee weapons and scavenging the environment for health items every now and then. Then I opened the guns, and the problem became a joke.

Even if you don’t have enough ammo on you to blow up an entire area of ​​the map without resupplying, they will allow you to drop limbs from basic zombies with a single shot and make the critical damage to enemies above at a safe distance. . Combine that with your skill balls and Curveballs, and you can become untouchable. Dead Island 2 tries to match this by spawning more and more enemies on the map with more story missions as you progress, but all it does is end up taking longer. of the game with a load of spongey healthbars.

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Your first few encounters with each of the special enemies are fun, but they’ve been reworked into regular encounters scattered across the map. The first time I fought one of the hulking Crushers, fair but smart. When you’re on your way to a wedding, you’ll run into a bride who’s turned into a zombie, and you’ll have to protect her as romantic music plays in the background. Avoiding slow, telegraphed attacks and the chance to jump right in to avoid his trash made for a memorable and funny episode; which suddenly hurt when I walked out and ran into another Crusher about two minutes after completing the story mission.

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Dead Island 2’s weakest point, however, is its shaky story. You spend the whole of the short notice looking for soft historical sources to visit each different part of LA, to be constantly introduced to new things, ending up in the second part of the transferring you to a new location. Most of these were written in a provocative nudge-nudge, wink-wink fashion, with washed-up actors and LA socialites making up most of the cast. But writing that elevates these words beyond their original meaning is not funny or witty, and it certainly isn’t clever enough to play as satire.

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It’s also kind of hard to tell when certain jokes are meant to be, in a b-movie way, or when they’re poorly written. About halfway through the main story, you’re introduced to “sKOpe” – an Amazon Alexa-style device that enters the sidebar to track other sKOpes on a map. It would have been funny when my character spoke in a monotone voice so that sKOpe could understand it – if I hadn’t been prompted three separate times before a game ad to connect to an Amazon Alexa to Death Island 2 so I can use it for voice commands. Is this a bad send off of his own marketing business, or just a bad attempt to cover up the brand?

Not too bad – some of the side quests managed to get a laugh out of me, even if they were few and far between. The side quests are better than what the main story has to offer, as they rely on silly characters for their humor and never get into the mishandled seriousness and action. Drama about the main story.

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bad to the bone

As far as those storylines are concerned, I can’t think of the last time I played through a campaign with such uninspired plot choices. The amount of time I’ve had to find a table to fix a circuit breaker or fix pressure sensors on some pipes is embarrassing. At worst, your character will joke about how often you have to solve monotonous puzzles to get ahead. I thought it would be seen as a kind of good-time, self-awareness from the devs, but it was just annoying to me. If you know your puzzles are bad, why do you force me to play them?

I played through Dead Island 2 on two separate machines, one high-end (Ryzen 9 5900X, RTX 4080, 64GB RAM) and one lower (i7-7820X, GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER, 16GB RAM), and both went smoothly. In fact, the low-end build is able to run the game with all settings on Ultra – with only minor FPS drops compared to its beefy counterpart. The camera button and image settings are also stable, which is easy considering how high the motion blur is set by default.

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Regardless of the build I ran the game on, I ran into some pretty cool FPS drops during some parts of the main story. A special part, where you fight on a military patrol, my FPS dropped to 30 (probably because of the amount of zombies on the screen). One area of ​​the game, Beverly Hills, had another problem where the game dropped to 20 FPS every time I closed a menu, although thankfully it could be fixed by opening it. repeating and closing again. These issues are the exception rather than the rule, however, from what I’ve tried, the game seems to run well even on limited hardware – which is a relief given that the recent uptick in poor PC ports. (opens on new page).

I ran into some common bugs, some of them minor (like resources dropping on the ground before I could get them, and seeing the mixing a few things that throw me half way across the map) and others that are bigger. (like when I cut into a wall during the loading cinematic, or some quests refused to progress). I haven’t run into any broken or advanced players that can’t be fixed with reloads, however, and Dead Island 2’s checkpoints and autosaves are something I’ve lost before. of two minutes of progress each time.

Apart from the known technical performance, it is difficult to find a major reason to recommend Dead Island 2. Although the combat feels intuitive, it does little to compensate for the many shortcomings of the game – even if the game does not develop within twenty years of the game. notification hour.