In fact, even the more modest build managed to run the game with all settings on Ultra – with only minor FPS drops compared to its beefier counterpart. I played through Dead Island 2 on two separate builds, one that was relatively high end ( Ryzen 9 5900X, RTX 4080, 64GB RAM) and another that was a bit more modest (i7-7820X, GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER, 16GB RAM), and both generally ran pretty smoothly. If you know your puzzles suck, why are you forcing me to play them? I'm sure it's supposed to come across as some kind of cute, self-aware moment from the devs, but instead it only served to annoy me further. Worse still, your character will joke about how often they're tasked with solving the same monotonous puzzles to progress. The amount of times I was tasked with finding a battery to repair a circuit breaker or fixing the pressure sensors on some pipes is frankly embarrassing. (Image credit: Dambuster Studios) Bad to the boneĪs for the actual content of those story missions, I honestly cannot think of the last time I played through a campaign with design choices this uninspired. The side quests in general feel a lot more flavourful than anything the main story had to offer, as they tend to lean into more absurd characters for their humour and rarely veer into the kind of mishandled seriousness and drama the main story is prone to. It's not all bad-a few of the side quests did manage to coax a couple of laughs out of me, even if they were few and far between. Is this a cheeky send-up of its own co-marketing deal, or just an awkward attempt to lampshade it? It might have been funny when my character made a point of speaking in a monotone voice just so the sKOpe could recognise her - if I hadn't been prompted on three separate occasions beforehand by an in-game advertisement to connect an Amazon Alexa to Dead Island 2 so I could use it for voice commands. Over half way through the main story, you're introduced to “sKOpe”-an Amazon Alexa-style device involved in a sidequest to track down other sKOpes throughout the map. It's also sort of difficult to tell when exactly some jokes are intentionally terrible, in a b-movie kind of way, and when they're simply poorly written. Yet at no point is the writing ever funny or witty enough to elevate these characters beyond their base concepts, and it's certainly never clever enough to play it off as satire. Most of these characters are written to be annoying in a cheeky nudge-nudge, wink-wink sort of way, with washed up actors and LA socialites forming the majority of the cast. You spend the whole of the short campaign finding flimsy narrative excuses to visit each different section of LA, constantly being introduced to new, disposable characters who stop being relevant the second the plot transitions you into a new area. Dead linesĭead Island 2's weakest element, however, is its shambling story. Dodging the brute’s slow, telegraphed attacks and timing jumps correctly to avoid her ground slams made for a pretty memorable and funny set piece one that was instantly soured when I walked outside and ran into another Crusher roughly two minutes after completing the story mission. As you make your way through a wedding venue, you run into a bride-to-be turned zombie, and have to fend her off as slow, romantic music plays in the background. The first time I fought one of the hulking Crushers, it was straightforward but enjoyable. Your first encounters with each of these special enemies can be pretty fun, but they're immediately recycled into standard encounters scattered throughout the map. You spend the whole of the short campaign finding flimsy narrative excuses to visit each different section of LA, constantly being introduced to new, disposable characters. Dead Island 2 attempts to balance this by spawning more and more boss enemies on the map and in the main story missions as you progress, but all that serves to do is to pad out the game's length with a load of spongey healthbars. Pair that with your skill buffs and your Curveballs, and you can easily become untouchable. Then I unlocked guns, and the difficulty became a joke.Īlthough you'll never have enough ammo on you to burn through an entire area of the map without having to resupply, they do allow you to pop the limbs off basic zombies with a single shot and deal critical damage to boss enemies at a safe distance. The first third of the campaign is relatively challenging, and I found myself constantly burning through all of my melee weapons and scrounging the environment for health items on a regular basis. Whilst not every game needs adjustable difficulty, Dead Island 2 certainly feels like it could have used it – not because it's too hard, necessarily, but rather because it's so inconsistent. This is probably a good time to mention that Dead Island 2 doesn't have any form of difficulty settings.
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