After a very intense intro, I find myself on a plane headed for safety with a very diverse group of personalities. The zombie apocalypse has hit Los Angeles, which is often referred to here as Hell-A instead of classic LA. I choose to play as the male stripper Ryan, who is described in the game as a tank character, knowing that the flight will not be as calm as it may seem at the time.
As I wrote in the preview mine, it would be something of an anti-climax if, after an almost unprecedented development hell, the game consisted only of an intro that took me to safety and then the adventure was over. The plane barely manages to get air under its wings before it crashes. Fortunately, Ryan survives and meets a surviving LA celebrity in Bel-Air – where the adventure begins.
At first glance, you really can’t tell how hard the developers have worked on the game, which has been bounced around between studios like a basketball. It’s simply Dead Island, a game I played quite a bit when it first came out, and a lot of it is instantly recognisable. We have the vacation paradise invaded by undead monsters, we have the game setup where I collect all kinds of tools that can be used as weapons, skills that can be unlocked, equipment upgrades, rage mode that can be activated and a world of survivors that need your help.
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Early on, Ryan appears to be immune to zombie bites, leading him to believe he can help create a vaccine, which begins a journey through countless iconic Los Angeles landmarks. Furthermore, I think Los Angeles, especially during the day, is incredibly well portrayed, and I’m quite tempted to book another LA tour after crushing zombie skulls along palm-lined boulevards in the scorching sunshine.
But from the first moment something bothers me. And it’s that I find it hard to shake the fact that Dead Island 2 feels a bit old and is better suited to a PC with a mouse and keyboard than a regular controller. The former problem is bigger and is due to several different things, but one of the most serious is that the developers do not offer any good game variety. You have to search for countless minimal elements to progress with a controller that feels a little too stiff.
These types of quests feel very dated, and the puzzles usually consist of clicking on something and figuring out what you need (a battery, a water jug, a key, and so on), and then you have to find what you need and move on. Occasionally, however, there will be more difficult challenges, such as using water to conduct electricity to something. You get walkthroughs of all of this, so it never really gets too hard. As you search, there are the usual zombies you’ll have to deal with, and hopefully you’ll also find plenty of materials along the way that you can later use to either repair and/or upgrade your tools. However, I’m not at all sold on the concept of having multiple items in each room to pick up. Collecting materials isn’t much fun and the variety of them is poor. Without the precision of the mouse, I’m often unable to pick up the scrap metal or electronic junk I so desperately want, causing me to stall and ruining the game’s sense of pace and rhythm.
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Fortunately, the matches are all the more entertaining. The game is full of different types of enemies and it is important to have the right equipment and skills. The developers have boasted a lot about how you can literally dismember the enemies, which actually works almost shockingly well. Early on in the adventure, I regularly chose to chop off the legs of my opponents so that they would come crawling after me with their legs sticking out of their stumps rather than quickly attacking and running as a group. This feature remains clever throughout the game (it’s never boring to almost completely cut a jaw so it hangs from a fleshy zombie face), though it becomes a bit more of a gimmick on harder enemies whose body parts I can’t cut off so easily.
In the battles, there is also a parry system that gives you the chance to quickly counter enemy attacks. However, it doesn’t feel completely watertight as the game system is a little too clumsy to use with the precision I’m used to as a fighting game player. Often there are also traps to use for spectacular kills, such as pouring water near loose power lines or using gasoline to turn zombies into walking bonfires. None of this feels particularly unique or, for that matter, extraordinarily good, but it still works more than well and feels entertaining. The exceptions are the more anonymous boss fights, where the developers have created obvious traps you can use for easier victories.
The concept of weapons being worn down by combat is something that I often find destroys more than it adds. I understand that the developers want to create an extra challenge and extend the game time by constantly having to search for materials for repair, but having a massive crowbar that becomes useless after smashing a few rotten zombie skulls just feels stupid. In addition, you get so much material that you never have to throw away your favorite items, which can also be repaired an infinite number of times. This makes the wear mostly a point of irritation. However, upgrading the weapons on the workbenches you find is easy and fun. Being able to give your golf club fire properties, for example, is oddly satisfying.
Replacing the classic skill tree with some kind of skill deck is also appreciated, and is a very flexible system that allows you to choose which abilities you want to activate at any given time. When you play, you can have more and more activated at the same time, and of course also get a larger selection of different cards. I myself invested heavily in the crowd control feature, which often felt useful.
Dead Island 2 offers a believable world that has been left behind in a hurry. Everywhere there are traces of people who lived their normal lives before the zombie apocalypse hit. It’s exciting to go through people’s homes and in many cases be able to guess what happened when everything went to hell. Several objects can be picked up and contribute to a larger story. There are also some fine examples of social criticism which I will not divulge here.
The survivors I meet often give me side quests with varying rewards. I have done several of these, but there are few I would call good, or memorable. They often involve going to a location and then killing a bunch of zombies, sometimes with a twist like killing them with fire or throwing them from heights. The characters who provide the quests are rarely well acted and have almost provocatively flat personalities, like the influencer you meet early on who will record content of you killing zombies. Much more could have been done here.
All in all, Dead Island 2 is an entertaining adventure, especially if you have someone to play co-op with. It’s meaty, it’s long, and at times it’s very pretty. A kind of weird and digital Los Angeles vacation, if you will. But it’s also so true to the original that it’s almost completely devoid of surprises and feels structurally old. Fortunately, the original was a very good game and so is this, but not quite on the same level.
