[News] DEAD ISLAND 2 REVIEW

[Douma]

Roughly ten hours into my playthrough of Dead Island 2, I started to wonder if there was much point in continuing. I kept waiting for the game to introduce some new gameplay mechanic or narrative surprise that would keep me invested, or at the very least give me some kind of reason to keep going. After ten more hours, I was certain; if I wasn't playing this game for review, I'd have stopped playing long before its conclusion.

 

My biggest problem with Dead Island 2 is its gameplay loop, which isn't so much a loop as it is a flat circle. Get weapons, kill zombies, break weapons, get more weapons rinse and repeat. It might sound like a dismissive way to criticise a game, but in Dead Island 2's case the issue is that there's nothing outside of this loop to make engaging with it worthwhile. The game doesn’t have an open world as many may be expecting instead the map is segmented into 10 different locations that you can (eventually) fast travel between. Once you've completed the relatively short main story and mopped up the remaining side quests, all that’s left to do is travel to one of these areas and kill infinitely respawning zombies until you either quit or die of boredom. 

Is killing zombies fun, at least? Yes at first. At the start of the game, all you have are a few key skills and access to some basic melee weapons. This is the part of Dead Island 2 I had the most fun with, as I spent the majority of my time messing around with the “FLESH” system. Almost every body part a zombie has can be hacked off in a visceral and dynamic fashion, allowing you to cut off a zombie's leg at a specific point or pop out an eyeball with a well placed bonk to the head.

 

This is probably a good time to mention that Dead Island 2 doesn't have any form of difficulty settings. Whilst not every game needs adjustable difficulty, Dead Island 2 certainly feels like it could have used it – not because it's too hard, necessarily, but rather because it's so inconsistent. The first third of the campaign is relatively challenging, and I found myself constantly burning through all of my melee weapons and scrounging the environment for health items on a regular basis. Then I unlocked guns, and the difficulty became a joke.

Although you'll never have enough ammo on you to burn through an entire area of the map without having to resupply, they do allow you to pop the limbs off basic zombies with a single shot and deal critical damage to boss enemies at a safe distance. Pair that with your skill buffs and your Curveballs, and you can easily become untouchable. Dead Island 2 attempts to balance this by spawning more and more boss enemies on the map and in the main story missions as you progress, but all that serves to do is to pad out the game's length with a load of spongey healthbars.

https://www.pcgamer.com/dead-island-2-review/