Dead Island 2

Dead Island made an impression back in the day with its 2006 E3 trailer. The game itself, released in 2011, wasn't as well received. It nor its 2013 standalone continuation, Dead Island: Riptide, ever piqued my interest. Especially after having played 2015's Dying Light, going to a more co-op focused zombie whacker without parkour didn't seem all that exciting. All these mentioned games were developed by Techland, though I think the Dead Island IP was always Deep Silver's.

Repetitive zombie whacker with one good piece of DLC

I was going to likewise pass on 2023's Dead Island 2 -- developed by Dambuster Studios after the project first going through Techland, Yager Development, and Sumo Digital -- but I then saw its Haus DLC being played and it actually looked interesting. The base game was given away by Epic so I had to buy only the DLC. I also picked up the second story DLC, SoLA, but it didn't turn out to be great. Haus is the best the game has to offer, an above average experience, while the rest is a repetitive and quite annoying slog.

Dead Island 2 is perfectly playable solo -- you just don't have anyone to help you up and have to replay a bit. Other players would make the game easier in general as well, though. The tougher variants of the late game zombie types can get frustrating. I was knocked down to the ground so damn many times either by some forceful zombie attack or something exploding; I got tired of seeing the same getting-up animation. It also got vexing that your character can only fall on their back, so they will do a 180 in the air if the blow came from behind.

You can select from 6 different characters -- or slayers, as they're called. My first pick was Amy for being the prettiest -- not that you would see much of her during first person gameplay anyway -- but I changed my mind due to her passives looking rather weak. There are also some character-exclusive perk cards found in-game that possibly make other characters more durable. I suppose Amy being the fastest one would have made all the running around in SoLA more tolerable.

So I instead chose Carla who's one of the tankier picks. I would need to play through the game as another character to be able to actually tell if there's a difference. I can say, though, that there was plenty of challenge; Carla didn't make the game easy mode. SoLA got quite sweaty with its clotter and whipper zombies. The DLC's final boss I also had to retry few times, having to readjust my approach until I beat it (without changing my perks, though). It was ever so slightly rage-inducing that after I finally did manage to kill it, the game crashed in the following cinematic and I had to redo the long-ass fight one more time.

Otherwise I didn't encounter technical problems in the game. Instead an issue was served by the Epic Games Launcher. It had been completely fine in June when I played through almost all of the base game. But when I returned to it in August, the launcher developed a weird problem that caused it to restart itself, few times an hour, while I was playing. Dead Island 2 continued to run unaffected; it just was irksome to have the game loose focus and/or the launcher pop over it every now and then.

In some post in the past, I think it was for Borderlands 3, I mentioned how loot-driven games should solve the problem of an item found at a lower level becoming obsolete later. I don't know why I had forgotten but it had been absolutely solved: you simply need a way to upgrade the item's level -- such an easy solution. Assassin's Creed Odyssey has that. And so does this game, too. I guess it only comes down to developers wanting to include it.

Plenty to dislike

In addition to the knockdowns being annoying, the Dead Island 2's elemental features got on my nerves. I didn't like how modding a weapon with an element (including bleeding) would make it do zero damage against a zombie imbued with that element -- as if the physical impact no longer existed. Yet parrying that zombie would still allow me to kill it with a counterattack using the zero damage dealing weapon.

Like in Dying Light, there are firearms, too. I'd say they're fairly effective, just limited by the lack of ammunition available while in the field. The elemental immunity problem applies to guns as well -- it's almost better to go full physical and force on everything. I don't think anything is immune to that.

Environmental elemental effects are even more of a headache. There is always some sort of electricity, poison, or fire effect happening around you. I started to wish there was something to make you immune to at least one of them. Carla allegedly has the highest resilience stat but she sure still takes a whole lot of damage. Apparently, looking at the stats explanations now, Carla's 120 means she takes 10% less elemental damage, while Jacob with his 80 takes 10% more than the average 100 stat. The developers seem to have balanced resilience with peak health because Jacob has 3600 health at the maximum level of 30 while Carla has 3000. Also: Amy's 120 Agility means she walks 10% faster than the default but it has no effect on sprinting. In conclusion, the slayers' stats don't matter much.

One more irritation in Dead Island 2, at least for me, were its puzzles. How can you enjoy a brainless-fun zombie whacker when you constantly have to turn different valves to match a value and whatnot? Ultimately the puzzles aren't complicated but having to do them while dodging poison gas and electrified puddles and constantly spawning zombies makes them bothersome. Dying Light 2's standalone continuation, Dying Light: The Beast apparently got a Restored Land mode in which there is only a certain number of zombies to kill and then they stop coming. I feel all of this kind of games would need such. I think it would be very satisfying.

Oh right, the story

Obviously there is a zombie outbreak going on in Dead Island 2. The slayers are passengers on an evacuation flight away from Los Angeles but are shot down. The player characters obviously survive but then get bitten by zombies. They turn out to be immune, instead developing a fury mode. Over the game you visit Bel-Air, Beverly Hills, Hollywood Boulevard, Santa Monica Pier, and so on. I thought that was pretty much it. At times I felt like I was playing through that one boring-ass Far Cry 5 DLC.

That's why the cult thing in Haus had seemed so unusual to me and I had assumed it to be a separate adventure. Turned out that it was actually tied to the main game: you briefly do encounter few mysterious characters that are from the cult.

However, it wasn't the cult that made me intrigued rather than how the Haus DLC appeared to be so... arthouse. The cult -- and the zombies they became, like about everyone else -- wear latex, which is damn rare to see in a video game, especially to the extent it is done in this one. The location has some impressive visual design as well, and the story too has merit. And the revelation what is behind it all made actual sense, too.

Unfortunately, after that elevated experience, I played SoLA, from which I got the impression that the developers had wanted to do a music festival map and were out of ideas for anything deeper. The DLC's main questline gets egregiously repetitive with the same kind of special encounter needing to be done over and over. The map is the game's widest one and getting to places takes considerable amount of time, all the while zombies are popping out of the grass wherever you go. It was quite miserable.

The third zombie experience this year

Earlier this year, in April, I had happened to revisit two other zombie games: the already mentioned Dying Light as well as Days Gone. The former in particular wasn't a great refreshment of memory before Dead Island 2 due to the fun parkour basically disappearing from the first person gameplay. Dead Island 2 does have basic mantling but it is extremely limited with where you can climb.

I revisited Dying Light because I had finally acquired its Hellraid DLC. It was originally supposed to be a new game but Techland pivoted it into a DLC. It came with new achievements, and while I didn't have Dying Light at 100% completion, it still was a hit to my average rate on Steam. Some of Hellraid's achievements had looked intimidating but I had worried for nothing. There's a bounty to get 666 kills which rewards you with a double-barreled shotgun that has infinite ammo. The speedrun and nightmare achievements are pieces of cake with it. I also revisited the older Bozak Horde DLC whose achievements I was missing totally. It turned out to be easier than expected as well, although it did take a couple of failed runs.

Days Gone, too, had gotten an unexpected post-launch DLC. Broken Roads adds another horde mode score attack as well as a permadeath mode to the campaign with their associated achievements -- for the humble price of 10€. (It was discounted when I bought it, though.)  The new mode is not difficult to master, particularly because there is a nice spot where the zombies (mostly) can't get to, making the harder challenges effortless. From the mode you get Sarah's tank, which gives your bike in the campaign maximum tank capacity right from the start.

Having to play through the same exposition-forcing story for a third time was torturous -- the New Game+ run had been painful already -- even if I like the gameplay. The permadeath mode can be done on any difficulty (not that it mattered to me) and it also has an option to be per chapter instead of the whole game. Days Gone isn't transparent with its chapter structure but in practice it means you get checkpoints at certain main missions. The permadeath achievement is also rewarded upon completing the game on either setting.

Maybe because I chose the per-chapter permadeath, or because of the repetition, or because I don't find the game generally difficult -- or all combined -- I wasn't taking the run very seriously. I did briefly question the sensibility of attempting certain late game side mission in which you have to save a guy from a mine. But then I tried it anyway. I'm pretty sure the mission suppresses the spawning of the horde that lives in that mine. But the moment you have freed the guy, all bets are off and the horde can spawn anywhere on its route, including the fucking cave you're in. I reloaded back to the last checkpoint before I had even died and didn't attempt the mission again.

Once I died from not paying attention to where I was, and the guy I was trying to get to, shot the gas tank right behind me. I also died right before the very end to a thrown grenade I hadn't noticed, and had to replay that chapter once more. But I did in the end unlock 'Dead Don't Ride' and got the game back to 100%.