Roughly ten hours into my playthrough of Dead Island 2, I started to wonder if there was much point in continuing. I kept waiting for the game to introduce some new gameplay mechanic or narrative surprise that would keep me invested, or at the very least give me some kind of reason to keep going. After ten more hours, I was certain; if I wasn’t playing this game for review, I’d have stopped playing long before its conclusion.
My biggest problem with Dead Island 2 is its gameplay loop, which isn’t so much a loop as it is a flat circle. Get weapons, kill zombies, break weapons, get more weapons – rinse and repeat. It might sound like a dismissive way to criticise a game, but in Dead Island 2’s case the issue is that there’s nothing outside of this loop to make engaging with it worthwhile.
The game doesn’t have an open world as many may be expecting – instead the map is segmented into ten
