3/5 ★ – FoofDeckman's review of Dead Island 2.

Dead Island 2 is a game of all time. It’s not a terrible game, but an easily forgettable one even at its best and that kind of goes for the entire series. I played the original Dead Island game over a decade ago at this point, and the only thing I remember about it is having fun playing it with friends. The fact I can’t think of any distinguishable features from the original Dead Island really goes to show how little of an impact it had on me. Dead Island 2 has been in development hell for what feels like forever and the quality of the game reflects that. Not to say it’s particularly buggy or unpolished, in fact quite the opposite, but it definitely feels like a game that should have released a decade ago. Everything about this game is fine, there isn’t anything Dead Island 2 does particularly poorly, but none of it even attempts to push any boundaries. Every mission feels like a fetch quest, go to this spot, do the exact same task, and then return to the beginning. You rinse and repeat this process in all of the main missions of this game and it gets repetitive quickly. The gorey hack and slash combat of this game is easily the best aspect. You can slowly work away at the flesh of zombies you’re hitting to slowly expose organs and it’s extremely graphic but also incredibly satisfying and detailed mechanic that I haven’t seen in a lot of games. The story present in Dead Island 2 is awful, it’s annoying, unfunny and worst of all boring. One thing I hated about Dying Light 2 was how much the story pushed itself in your face without really having a justifiable reason in doing so, this does the same thing except if it were written by the writers of the Saints Row reboot. There’s 4 characters you’re able to choose from at the start of the game all of which have unique fully voiced dialogue. During my playthrough I played as Dani, who I found to be incredibly irritating. She has a reaction to literally everything that happens and talks almost non stop throughout the whole game. A lot of the time the way characters interact feel completely disconnected from each other, you’ll have one character tell my character something and her reaction would be completely out of left field and it’s jarring when it happens. I can’t stress enough how unlikeable this made the main character for me, especially after hearing her say “feck” every 20 seconds. Now I can’t speak for the other characters, but from the little clips here and there I’ve seen they don’t seem much better. The worst thing about the story of Dead Island 2, is that it just ends. Without getting into spoilers, the story has this long build up to this group of mysterious people, only for it to never be explained. Even if you were somehow engaged in this awful story, there’s just entire plot lines that are completely forgotten and never brought up again, some of them being quite major. It feels like this game was meant to have 2-3 more hours of story, but instead they end it before any questions set up earlier are answered. Its so bad, which is a shame because if the story was actually decent, this game would be significantly better as a result. The fun gorey combat and the crazy high detailed environment feels completely wasted, not that I expected anything crazy from Dead Island 2, but the foundation for something great is there. If you do plan on checking this game out I’d wait for a sale, and probably grab some friends to play along with you, as I’d imagine coop would drastically improve the experience.