Almost ten years on from its reveal, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dead Island 2 is🍬 finally here. Somehow, against all odds, the folks over at Dambuster Studios have created not only a halfway decent sequel, but some of the most fun I’ve had with the zombie apocalypse genre in quite some 💧time.
Your journey into Hell-A is fun, bloody, and never takes itself too seriously. That includes the narrative, which is more concerned with beating hordes of zombies to a pulp than it is about finding a vaccine and forming emotional connections with your fellow survivors. It isn’t utterly comical though, and the story does try to veer into more se▨rious territory on occasion.
The final act suddenly gets super-duper dramatic as you approach the inner sanctum of Hollywood and take shelter in a luscious shopping mall penthouse. Here you finally meet a scientist called Doctor Reed who you&rsqu🐲o;ve been chasing for the entire game, and his daughter who just happens to be the cure to infection. Or something along those lines. Dead Island 2 does a pretty poor job of explaining everything. He seems trust♔worthy at first as you run a handful of errands for the man after being promised evacuation by the CDC, but there is something sinister afoot.
As luck would have it, you finish up a treacherous quest on a crumbling Sant🌄a Monica Pier only to return and see the treacherous fucke🧔r running away in a helicopter. This betrayal is seemingly setting up the final act, although the reality is much more streamlined. After you assemble your allies for one final push into Hollywood - which involves a disgustingly long underground section amidst the subway tunnels - you emerge next to the Chinese Theatre and approach the final boss battle. What I was hoping would be a hugely explorable part of Hell-A is walled off by metal fences and a small red carpet, meaning the glitz and glamour Dead Island 2 would have done well to lean into is truncated for no good reason.
This is a game that gets exponentially better as you progress thanks to combat mechanics and traversal that reward high amounts of health and excessive power, so I was hoping for the Hollywood Walk of Fame to be one penultimate teardown before the big bad rocks up for a tussle. It is kinda that, as you walk over stars blazened with voice talent and pick up loot in the concession stands, but after a few minutes you stumble across a simple puzzle, explore yet anot🌃her underground lab, kill a suddenly infected doctor, and then watch a cutscene that folds into the credits. No resolution, no satisfying culmination to the past 20 hours, just a lazy cliffhanger that will n꧋o doubt depend on future downloadable content to wrap up loose ends.
Your character in Dead Island 2 is immune, and spends most of the campaign adopting new powers that take advantage of the emergent infection. It turns out you aren’t alone with your new powers, and a trio of fellow meta-humans have been following you around and planting directions into your mind this entire time. They only appear in a couple o๊f cutscenes though, and the ending sets them up as a major narrative focus in future expansions instead of giving them any development in the base game. Your friends retreat from Hell-A via chopper, and you choose to stay behind, the camera shifting to a third-person perspective as you beat back hordes of zombies to the rolling credits. It takes control away from us at a crucial moment that only serves to frustrate, and had me rolling my eyes at a game which I was otherwise taken by. Yet, I admire the balls Dambuster Studios has to do this at all.
Dead Island 2 has spent the better part of a decade in development hell, and I can’t ev🌱en imagine how many permutations its narrative went through over the years to get where it is today. The whole package is inconsistent, although I found the writing to be strong enough to keep me invested and asking questions about where it was all going. Likeable characters go a long way, but to edge us this close to resolution and then ask players to invest in upcoming expansions if they ever want to find out what happens feels like a shitty move, since this ain’t building up to Dead Island 3.
It reminds me of Asura’s Wrath of all things, infamous for hiding its final chapters behind a paywall. Dambuster is harkening back to a past era, which I suppose is awkwardly fitting given its history. Th🧔e cliffhanger isn’t effective here though – if anything it feels predictably contrived in how it tears us away from the world and doesn’t provide any hint as to how or when things will be addressed. I’ll be waiting to see where it all goes though, so perhaps their devious, old-school plan has done its job.
