may feel initially, the game will guide you exactly where it wants you to go and when it wants you to go there. Make no mistake, however, as wide open as the streets of L.A. There’s plenty to see and slaughter between various types of walkers, including garden-variety shamblers good for farming XP to hulking brutes that will pulverize you into mincemeat. Items are not so plentiful that you’ll be roaming around as an indestructible tank, but neither are they so scarce that you’ll have to be cautious of exhausting a favorite for fear that you’ll never be able to use it again.ĭEAD ISLAND 2 hides a lot of content in its faux-open world façade.
The game strikes a fair balance with these objects. Break a tool and it’s off to one of the many workbenches scattered around town to repair it or manufacture all new inventory with crafting materials collected during your journey. Additionally, enhancements offer improvements like increased attack speed – but often at the expense of durability. Weapons can be imbued with elemental effects such as fire and electricity, making up-close combat all the more visceral.
As enjoyable as it is to watch putrefied flesh tear from walking corpses, the real enjoyment comes by way of an onboard crafting system. Firearms round out the mix but are wholly unsatisfying, as guns feel like carbon copies of one another and lack any remarkable distinctions that would that entice favoring one over another. The game’s approach to weapons is fun, with an eclectic assortment of blades, blunt objects and brass knuckles to appease anyone’s inner sadist. Cards offer new attacks like dropkicks and ground-and-pounds, XP boosts and several additional benefits that shake up the approximately 20-hour campaign but never in a way that leaves any one single player feeling overpowered. A multi-tiered card system, whose spoils become available through story progression, provides some modicum of customization for individual play styles. Players select from one of six playable “Slayers,” each designed with an inherent set of buffs, such as progressive healing tied to consecutive kills or defense boosts after successful dodging of incoming attacks. Over-the-top NPCs and bizarro boss battles lead to some genuinely absurd moments that feel elevated in comparison to the mundanity of slicing and dicing through an unceasing onslaught of the undead. That’s not a bad thing because aside from a few minor quibbles about dialog redundancy, pulp expressionism is one of DEAD ISLAND 2’s most endearing qualities. Instantly noticeable to vets of the series, the lush, green hell of predecessors Dead Island (2011) and Dead Island: Riptide (2013) has been traded for the concrete jungle of Los Angeles, whimsically referred to as “Hell-A.” A campy tone pervades every nook and cranny of the game, marking a noted departure from the serious nature of the series’ earlier entries. The short answer is “yes” with a caveat of “maybe,” and that all depends on how individual players feel about a game that nails the fundamentals of what a good first-person RPG should be, but at a time when other more recent titles have already moved the goalposts. If you’re considering plunking down the cash for DEAD ISLAND 2, the most obvious question is, “Was it worth the wait?” That’s warranted, due to the fact the game languished in developmental hell for nearly a decade and was bounced around between developers like a freshly decapitated zombie head before finally landing on PC, Xbox and PlayStation consoles.
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