Dead Island 2 review: Never killing zombies was worth it

Something strange happened to me lately. On a regular basis throughout my life, I have thoroughly enjoyed games that captivate you with a powerful narrative, elaborate character development, and engaging plot evolution. I’ve always kind of ignored the other aspects, leaving playability and fun aside. But without knowing the reasons, I have been empathizing for a while now and enjoying these games more than ever. Dead Island 2 fell into my hands without too many expectations and the truth is that I had a lot of funIt seems to me a title that we should talk about even more than what we talk about.

Under this introduction the concepts of Dead Island 2 are very easy to explain. It’s a game that doesn’t focus on story development at all, but the story is the thread that lets you have fun killing zombies in almost any way you can imagine. Dead Island 2 becomes strong by exploiting very marked virtues, fun gameplay, a large number of weapons and an “open world” full of possibilities.

Dead Island 2 knows its virtues perfectly and exploits them

You start the game by choosing a protagonist from several characters who have different characteristics and statistics. Because Dead Island 2 tries to be more RPG than its previous installment, but it doesn’t try to be on a deep level nor does it want toIt’s just a layer of the kind that is very useful, for example, being able to compare our level with that of the enemies or directly showing in numbers how much damage we do to the enemy zombie with each hit, which is very visual to tell you whether you do enough damage or not. That is, these RPG elements are introduced more as something visual and to help the player than as a layer of playable depth.

In this direction Dead Island 2 offers us to explore Los Angeles in a kind of open world in which we have large tracts of land but which at certain times forces us to load a new area of ​​the map through a loading screen. Something not a problem at all but worth mentioning. This allows the open areas to which we have access to be worked and filled with materials, objects, destructible elements, secondary missions and content.

By publishing this analysis a little later than that of our colleagues in the press, it gave me time to read other reviews, since it is something that I do with each publication and it seems that I stand out some of the other colleagues, because Dead Island 2 seems to me that it does everything it offers very well and it is a product that ends up being what it surely wanted to be at the beginning. A title that seeks to entertain us by offering hundreds of weapons and ways to eliminate our enemies. Isn’t the story important? Well, it might not win the Best Screenplay Oscar, but it’s more than fair to take us to see the credits after having a great time.

The arsenal of weapons is perhaps the best thing about Dead Island 2. Not only because there are hundreds of them and we can improve and combine them, but also because the game forces us to explore scenarios to find them, leaving us with a very good feeling of satisfaction every time we let’s do our best to unlock a special room in a house or building and inside we get a weapon capable of wreaking havoc with the hordes of zombies. So I’m already anticipating something else, well the exploration of the scenarios will be quite important to discover secrets, weapons and find good materials with which to improve our arsenal.

It is quite true that once the game is over, our character has a destructive power where we are practically gods killing zombies. Here perhaps everyone’s personal opinion enters, because for me this, although it lessens the difficulty, makes me benefit a lot, because what do you want me to tell you, walking around feeling indestructible and killing anything that comes my way is so much fun.

Another thing that perhaps goes unnoticed in Dead Island 2 is the work Dambuster has put into the details. The game perfectly laughs at itself and presents criticism of society in the form of satireWell, if you look closer, you realize how much they portray social media culture, drifts and all that crazy stuff that reminds us that society has gone to hell, maybe even before the arrival of the zombies.

How long is Dead Island 2? Well, that’s an interesting question to answer. I’ve said before that it’s a game that rewards exploration, has side missions, and even has secrets to uncover, like finding keycards or safe combinations, which will not be easy to find at all. Well, in the end, between some things and others, it can take you 18-20 hours to complete the game despite trying to be pretty straightforward.. I say try because the scenarios are so well constructed, that it will be easy for us to explore or search to see if we find weapons or special parts.

Obviously, not everything in Dead Island 2 is so good.. It has an ability system that works with cards, as you level up you get cards with unique abilities that you can equip depending on how you play. You can have advantages by dodging several consecutive attacks, by killing zombies in a row… each card asks for a target to give you a reward in the form of bonuses to strength, speed, healing… The thing is that the system is interesting, but the reality is that I finished the game without paying too much attention to it either..

Is Dead Island 2 repetitive? In my case, I wanted even more.

One of the criticisms the game has received is that it is somewhat repetitive.. I can understand the criticism, in the end the game has a fairly flat story in the sense that the objectives always end up being the same, going from point A to point B to achieve a certain task. Personally, I didn’t get tired during my 18 hours of play, as I really enjoyed this path and focused on exploring. But I fully understand that this pattern can be repetitive for some people. The point here is to assess whether enjoyment and exploration can mitigate this important underlying lack of purpose. I never felt frustrated by it.

Finally say this I played the title on PS5 and graphically the game looks amazing for a project that doesn’t seek to exploit console hardware. At the start of the game they ask us if we prefer to prioritize between frame rate or resolution and I personally chose to play at 60 frames per second in a stable way.

The Wait For Dead Island 2 Was Worth It

In conclusion, despite many years of waiting for this Dead Island 2, I must say that the wait was worth it.. It’s a game that exudes personality as well as fun, two factors that are difficult to link. I’m not lying to you if I tell you that this might have been one of the games I had the most fun with last year. and I was very grateful to find such a proposal. Also remember that it has a cooperative mode that allows you to play with up to two other players, which I could not exploit much but is also interesting for those who are going to play with friends.

In short, Dead Island 2 is a game that does everything it seeks to do well, offering a fresh, fun and original proposition. it will give us a minimum of 18 to 20 hours of fun visiting a very well recreated Los Angeles in areas of the open world that we will explore or have explored with all the love in the world.