Load it up, cut your way through the hordes for a mission or two then take a break before the real boredom of it starts to set in. It's the kind of game that's best played in small bites. The environments are great, the atmosphere crafted is fantastic and while the game can be clunky to play, when it works it works really well. While I'm being negative the game is definitely fun to some degree. Can make just simple actions like jumping on objects or climbing extremely problematic, probably by design since this just nullifies the enemy A.I. Movement can be a real pain too, quite sluggish and momentum heavy, makes dodging various special infected rather difficult. Or it hurts the immersive aspect since suddenly the entire game world is full of random repair benches every 50 metres so while you never have to go far to fix stuff, it does come across as a bit silly. You'll be mired in loot to sift through but ultimately you'll want to be sticking to a few well upgraded reliables, but the constant need to repair stuff tends to drag down the experience. Unlike looter-shooters though, weapons here have durability and will break relatively quickly. But then you step back and realise that just moving from place to place sees you wading through hordes and hordes of these situations and you're then in a situation where fighting them takes ages or running past them is preferred, but also a bit more dangerous. It starts to get hairy when multiple enemies are involved so the game can create some tension with even basic situations. So you'll be pushing and kicking enemies to make an opening then making your attacks in relative safety. You can do that but you're likely to take the odd hit and that just leads to attrition. Combat with single enemies can be quite deadly and thus it requires a little bit of finesse compared to just hacking away wildly. This is very similar to what the looter-shooter genre that emerged from this era, except more melee focused. So the core problems for those unaware, the main one being just sheer tediousness. If anything I expect more people to be disappointed by this because it really does not offer much new on what was a fairly flawed and repetitive concept originally. As a result if you hated the original this won't turn you around, and even though I said I enjoyed this a bit more, it wasn't a grand design change that flipped me completely so I don't expect many people will actually come away with a similar sentiment. The quests and everything else are the same basic "go here, fetch this, kill that" stuff you'll have seen anywhere else. There is very little, if anything truly new from a gameplay perspective aside from a new island to explore and characters to interact with. From a gameplay perspective, this is basically just more Dead Island, to the point where I expect that this was originally a DLC campaign promoted and expanded to the level of a mini-sequel. My best guesses are that between importing a character that was already quite well levelled up and thus had a lot of their more enjoyable skills on hand, and with the core gameplay and its shortcomings understood, the more enjoyable elements were then able to stand out a bit more. After putting 22+ hours into this game I walked away thinking it was much shorter than the previous game but after checking the time spent in both they were nearly identical, and I really can't explain why one felt longer than the other. 22h 36m PlayedHard to really explain but I enjoyed this game somewhat more than I did the original Dead Island.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |