Dead Island 2 (PC) Review

One of the best zombie killing games has been in my hands for days. Dead Island 2 comes with everything and shows us Hell-A in an extremely chaotic way. With extremely amazing graphics and pretty gory visual detail this game promises to return to its reign.

First of all, it is very interesting to see the adaptation of the city of Los Angeles in a post apocalyptic way and full of zombies everywhere. For a person who lives in Southern California it makes everything seem too familiar, well put together and let me tell you, HELL-A is a city you don’t want to live in.

After many delays and the feeling that it was never going to be released, Dambuster Studios decides to give us his best work. The game feels fresh, very different from the original and best of all, it feels like a new (current) generation game.

The gameplay feels renewed, slow in some cases but at the same time it has a certain kind of surrealism that makes it more fun. For everyone who played the first Dead Island like me, you will find some very familiar stuff and some pretty new but excellent stuff. Before continuing with the whole experience, let’s know a little about the technical specifications of my PC.

Knowing the power of my PC, let’s move on to the part that most interests many and that is the performance of the game. When it comes to playing, all the performance can be said to be exceptional. Much of my gameplay was tied between 4K and 1440p resolutions to really test how much of a difference it would make. As you can see in the images below, it can reach up to 180 fps in some cases but only under low screen stress and few zombies.

Both the CPU and GPU temperatures remained stable as well as the consumption. Thus confirming that the game is well optimized from my point of view. Obviously these tests were performed on the highest quality graphics possible in the game. When facing the zombies, it was possible to notice how the movement was not affected by the amount of graphics shown, making it clear that the performance is optimal. Although we have many options to execute it, I am always going to recommend that this kind of games, both single player and cooperative, be played in the highest graphic fidelity possible.

Much of the immersion in these games is how well we can see our surroundings at the level of textures, sound and above all fluidity. Dead Island 2 It has nothing to envy to any game of the same quality released in 2023, I can’t say that it’s the best visual experience I’ve had, but for its style it’s quite interesting to see the good graphics it has.

When we start our game we can choose between several characters, each character has different stats that depending on our style of play we adapt. For example we have Amy, a character who actually does do gymnastics. Obviously he has the agility attribute maxed out however he doesn’t take much damage. His stamina and the ability to recover life is standard but with the help of innate abilities (a series of cards that we will unlock) we can balance this out a bit.

Contrary to Amy we have Ryan, who is a “tank” character since he takes a lot of damage but his movement is literally very slow. In the same way these abilities of average use like recovery of life and stamina are within the balance. The cards in the abilities that he has go from the ability to regenerate life faster every time he eliminates a zombie and things like that.

My favorite is Jacob since he lasts a lot, he has a high life bar but his resilience is lower so we must not allow a large number of zombies to ambush us since it will go badly for us.

The other characters can be seen below:

The narrative of Dead Island 2 It is exceptional, you cannot deny listening to each of the debates that we have both in the cinematics and around it. There is always something interesting to pay attention to while we play. For me, in some cases, some narratives simply do not make sense, what we are interested in knowing is at each moment and I don’t know if it really is because you appear in a place where the zombie apocalypse is practically new and we are adjusting.

In each mission I want to know the outcome, what it is about and even what is the reason for all this mess. Having that feeling of playing a zombie game just to kill each one of those hordes doesn’t make sense if the story isn’t interesting and in this case it’s the opposite. I can admit that one of the most interesting moments is really listening to those intermissions from my character while I defend myself against dying from zombies in a game.

In this case we don’t have a skill tree as I had commented, but we have cards that add an ability to dodge twice or so that less stamina is consumed and so on. It really is not that complicated to understand once you look at the icon to know the type of advantage it offers you, if it is for protection, ability or that you benefit from knocking down a zombie at the moment.

The desEsports Extrasof the enemies is quite special. I was really quite surprised to see that somehow we don’t repeat the same enemy every time. Not all zombies look the same but at the same time we have some specific zombies that give us that feeling that they have a specific class.

Each specific zombie has that ability that you know very well you must face it in a specific way. It’s like runners, you need to immobilize them early before they get close to you or sadly you will have no choice but to die. The difficulty of the game is really interesting since we are not facing a game in which each zombie is nobody, in fact each zombie has a way of dealing with it, which makes the game more complicated than normal.

In the game we also have vendors that will provide us with weapons, crafting items to improve these weapons and of course first aid kits to heal ourselves. They really are very necessary and more if you don’t really want to look for those special weapons. Personally, I don’t see any problem using the weapons on the floor, the only drawback is the wear and tear on them that we must keep an eye on to be able to repair them later.

The use of melee weapons here are really of great interest and as I mentioned it is important that you can use them in a cunning way without any rush. Checking well how long they have to live is the first step to being successful in the game.

The bloody environment is present at all times and I must tell you that if you are sensitive to these things you should take it into account since the game does not have any type of censorship. In the same way the game has this technology that makes the zombie disfigure while you hit it and this is really the most interesting thing about the game.

Like all games of this type with friends it is much more fun. Although the game does not support cross-play, it is still very entertaining to play with friends. While playing with my partner Arturo Vasquez we didn’t notice any change in difficulty but we could see that the games are obviously a bit easier to handle.

Traps activated by your partner in co-op affect you equally, so it’s always good to try to keep some distance from each other. This cooperative works in the most traditional way possible, you join the story of who is the host leaving your game behind but your character has all the inventory of your individual game.

When you start your game you must make sure that it is a multiplayer game, otherwise your partner will not be able to enter in any way. Obviously the privacy options are on and available. Everything else is up to your imagination, going around finding stuff and slaying zombies is definitely much better with friends as singles can be pretty catastrophic.

In conclusion

Dead Island 2 He came to get the best out of us and show us that it’s not just about eliminating zombies, but rather how you do it. The game has already known but perfected gameplay and best of all, it fits in an impressive way. On a visual level we have a game that details absolutely everything and makes the immersion even more real. The performance of the game in 4K UHD and 1440p resolutions can be a topic for many since the fun is in that visual detail that makes us fall in love with an apocalyptic city. Each character has its positive and negative points and this makes them an excellent mix when it comes to playing cooperatively and I feel that each one of them is balanced in addition to the fact that we can adapt it to our gameplay with those abilities.

We have an excellent narrative that makes you listen to every conversation of the characters and know what will really happen later. The story makes a lot of sense and although the job of the game is to eliminate zombies to get out of the city alive or rather survive all this catastrophe I think it was worth all the waiting to see a second Dead Island. Not seeing a zombie repeated in several confrontations gives a sense of relief and eliminates repetitiveness but the traps remain the same over and over again, at some point they prefer not to use them to move on. Not having cross-play is a low blow for this type of game because the reality is that it is much more with friends and obviously much less difficult. This review was done on PC and the copy of the game is thanks to Deep Silver.