Dead Island 2 Review

"Hell-A!"

Campaign

May 6, 2023 at 6:49pm
By Jason Stettner

It’s been quite awhile since we last embraced the world of Dead Island. Almost just as long since we were first teased that the follow-up was coming down the road. That moment has finally arrived, and we’ve returned to the Dead Island once more.

That is, except this time it’s landlocked within Los Angeles. You get to see some of the iconic places in touring, yet at the same time lose that sense of an open world experience. A bit disappointing as I imagined a follow-up would expand upon the core concepts introduced in the older titles but it does come across as shrunken.

It’s still a fine zombie bashing time, but it feels less like a follow-up and more like a generic zombie adventure that’s had the Dead Island title thrust upon it which is a tad odd. It delivers on a decently long story with a couple side quests here or there.

Those extra quests don’t feel quite fleshed out however since you revisit the same areas multiple times since the spaces aren’t spread out, feeling less organic than they did in the older games. The mystery continues where with a brief montage you’re thrown out into the big world and realize that you are lucky, and immune!

Along your journey you’ll meet a cast of characters, largely new faces for which you won’t learn a whole lot about them. After going from place to place your adventure will eventually end allowing you to continue battling along if you so choose. It’s decently lengthy, yet at the same could have offered something more to dive into as it feels limited in scope.

While you can play it solo, it can be more fun to dive into in coop play. Story wise it is light as well with it being a bunch of areas lightly strung together without too much context. It’s also almost abrupt in the way everything comes to a conclusion but as always the door must be open for more down the road I suppose.

Gameplay

This does actually run quite well and looks decently fine alongside that. It’s certainly a cross gen sort of title, but at the same time the 4k resolution at 60fps is stable. The window reflections are however atrocious. Perhaps a weird thing to note, but they do stand out horribly bad when going about. If you go to play the game, just a glance and you’ll know what I mean.

With that, another aspect I’d love to highlight is the visual quality and technology behind the zombie dismemberment technology. It’s insanely gnarly. You can break down the zombies to the bones, all the flesh and everything can be removed via shooting or using the array of customizable weapons.

They’re all level scaled too as you progress so new tools will be available. I will with that also mention that the game does have an odd level scaling where it suddenly gets rather difficult very quickly which is strange. I would recommend spending some time doing the odd quest as if you keep one level higher everything all of a sudden becomes super easy again.

It’s very strange and somewhat out of place as you’d have to randomly backtrack through levels to become performant enough again. It’s weird, really. The environments are quite well detailed with lots of dismay and gore since zombies have been out feasting. They are however linear and smaller in scale.

The Conclusion

Dead Island 2 is a bloody good time for the most part, but lacks the sense of scale I had anticipated in a sequel despite there being such a gap in time. It really doesn’t feel like a true successor and more or less is another zombie game dawning the moniker which is slightly fine I suppose.

I’m not necessarily saying that the original games were some cherished premium classics but I did enjoy them for what they were and expected a sequel to have more. It might have been the various delays or other problems that caused the issues, but I rate based on what it is versus what it should be I suppose. The biggest thing was just expecting an expansion of concepts, not something that shrinks upon those.

With that, it’s a fine time where you bash some zombies and run through miscellaneous locations in Los Angeles meeting the odd individual along the way. It’s more fun in coop, but you can play alone and you’ll just need to be careful of some difficulty spikes that may arise.

They seemed silly as you could level and it would be simple again, but that’s just how it went. I will miss the exploration elements of older Dead Island titles and I hope we get a follow-up sooner than later that stretches back into that territory.

Read our Dead Rising Triple Pack Review
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Dead Island 2 Review on Xbox Series X
Review Code Provided by Deep Silver

Rating Overall: 6.6