I have completed Dead Island 2 and the Haus DLC after roughly 32 hours.

In my first impressions post, I was concerned about the map being cramped, the existence of skull-level enemies that further discouraged what little exploration was possible, and how the emphasis on environmental hazards combined with the first two points led me to focus on carrying around car batteries (etc) instead of weapons. Over time and after gaining levels, the 2nd and 3rd points evaporated on their own. “Hell-A” as a general area though, remained very restricted for the entirety of the game.

What did improve was a rather hilarious (to me) and overpowered strategy to zombie combat: maiming. In most zombie games, attacks to the head are the only way to kill them. That works here too, but the problem is that different zombies walk/run with different gaits, making precise targeting difficult. Missing a Heavy Attack with a spear leaves you very vulnerable to attacks from other zombies, or even the one you’re trying to kill; I’ve been reduced to 25% HP from the flailing of even the most basic of Shamblers, after missing several times in a row. Nevermind the fact that Runner zombies actually can dodge your Heavy Attacks.

What is considerably easier than landing a head shot is a leg shot. With, say, a Claymore or Katana. With the right Perk Cards and weapon mods selected, limb hits become automatic critical hits that grant buffs to further enhance damage. Some level of which becomes unnecessary as you straight-up chop zombie legs right off with one hit. What happens then? Slowly crawling zombie. At that point, you could cut off one of their arms to instantly kill them – zombies with no arms or no legs will keep attacking, but apparently the coders couldn’t handle half-n-half – or kick them and follow-up with a head stomp for an instant kill that way. Regardless, facing a huge arena full of running undeath and reducing it to a pathetic pile of flopping undeath never stopped being funny to me.

Apex zombies, as you can imagine, didn’t lose their legs as quickly. (Un)fortunately, most of them have attack moves that leave their heads in a static position, making headshots with a hunting rifle quite easy. I’m not sure whether the devs intended you to delete the Apex ones with 2 shots from a rifle and render everything else inert with leg-chopping, but that’s what I did the whole way through.

That’s about all the good things I can say about Dead Island 2.

Yeah, that was good stuff. Everything else was extremely dumb or half-assed, at best.

The Perk Card system has to be one of the worst character progression mechanics I have seen in any game. The premise is that you can mix and match different abilities (cards) based on your play style, but you literally never know what any of the cards are until you unlock (or find!) one, so it’s all just something that… happens. Nothing to look forward to, nothing to build towards, it may as well not have existed. This isn’t even getting into the fact that most of them are incredibly weak or so hyper-focused as to be useless. Literally who gives any shits about making zombies explode in specific ways when you kill them during your “ultimate” mode? Every zombie dies at the same speed by holding down left-click in said mode.

The “economy” of the game and general gear progression is similarly disappointing. I started typing up a long explanation of the mechanics, but it’s irrelevant. Suffice it to say, there is an immense bottleneck for basic crafting components that only gets more and more ridiculous as time goes on. Like, you originally might not be able to add Electric damage to a knife because you don’t have enough Electronics. That’s cool. But when you are in the endgame and can’t mod shit because everything takes 10 Scrap, that’s dumb. Vendors will sell literally 1-2 pieces of Scrap and that’s it. What the fuck is the point? “Disassemble the weapons you pick up instead of selling them.” Let me disassemble this epic worth $7,000 and… oh cool, 6 Scrap. All this encourages is for you to settle on 3-4 weapons and upgrade them (using cash) to match your level, rendering all other drops as vendor trash you don’t bother even trying out because you can’t afford to mod them to see if they are any good.

And don’t get me started on the sidequests. Ran my ass around three different maps reconstructing the dude-bro antics of a thieving pool boy and a goddamn generic-ass blue sword popped out of the chest at the end. I understand that I completed this sidequest later than “immediately once it was available” but after I looked at the Wiki for the others, they were similarly dumb. It’s Dead Island not Fallout, I know, but if you’re designing a Looter Slasher, you might want to actually ensure there’s a reason to do all the chores you set up.

The overall story is also dumb. Again, it’s Dead Island, I’m not expecting some treatise on the human condition. But I don’t know what’s worse: how blatantly they are setting up story resolution in a future DLC (Haus did fuck-all), or that they’re pushing it off into a Dead Island 3. They didn’t leave a story thread dangling, it’s the whole goddamn shirt. This is one of those games where you’re not even sure you did anything at the end.

So… that’s that. Unless you were a super-fan of the original Dead Island, or even if you were, Dead Island 2 is not something I would particularly recommend.