The most clever thing Dead Island 2 does with is writing is refer to zombie overun Los Angeles as "HELL-A". Every other line of dialogue in this game is incompentnet, annoying, boring, and steryotypical cringe; its the infuriating combination of attempting to avoid anything that could be considered offensive whilst also trying to make a parody of an entire subculture of people. Its very easy to clown on Californians, but these people fail to say anything funny the whole game that actually takes itself quite seriously when it shouldn't. To produce something this completely unfunny and uninteresting after a decade in development is hella embarrassing. Skip the cutscenes and ignore everything the characters say, because they're all idiotic stereotypes and the story is every zombie trope you've ever seen and nothing else. Its never clever. Its never smart. Its never funny. Everyone who wrote for this game is incompentnet as a writer, not as people, not as a developers, AS WRITERS. Please next time pay someone to write for your game who knows how to write, maybe someone funny huh?
There is one thing the game has done better than any other game to date. Thats of course the extremely detailed gore-dismemberment technology for the zombies. For a game where you smack zombies over and over and over and over again, it takes a while to get old. Its the pinnacle of being desensitized to violence, and will be disgusting to some people, but the gore is still not as gross as the game's dialogue. In fact, I think this system might be the only reason the game wasn't canceled altogether, because without this it would have absolutely nothing new, and nobody was begging for another Dead Island game anyway. The technology will transfer over to future games and its certainly impressive (if you can stomach it). But remember, writing that is this horrible is the true threat to society, not violence or zombies.
You dont kill massive hordes of zombies, but instead get right up in their face and bash them apart bit by bit. You also have some creative ways to use the environment and some powerful abilities, things you would expect in any modern game, and you can probably put together some really crazy builds. However, Dead Island 2 being modernized in every way possible is also a mistake. I can turn off all the stupid unnecessary HUD stuff, the hitmarkers, health bars, stun meters, damage numbers. But I can't do anything about the fact that I can wander into an area where the zombies are just arbitrarily higher level and slap me dead in 1 hit. This game doesn't need a damn leveling system, it doesn't need crafting and resource gathering. It doesn't need weapons to have damage numbers, or any of these pointless stat buffs and RPG elements. Because its not an RPG, its a game that is fun to slay zombies mindlessly in for a while while you also suffer listening to incompentnet writers from an English dev studio portray what they think Californians are like.
This game is really big, and enjoying it really just comes down to enjoying cuting zombies apart and becoming increasingly more powerful. Its fun for a while, but I personally think a game like this would just be way better as a minalmist zombie slaying simulator without most of the RPG nonsense. But I guess when you're in development hell for so long you just need to invent things for people to do. The game doesn't even have a continuous open world or any other dimension to the gameplay, no vehicles, parkour, or real exploration. Its just smacking and slicing zombies thousands of times across pretty landscapes and iconic spots in LA.
You dont laugh, you don't think, you aren't challenged, you move pretty slowly, you don't listen to the characters, and you really just want to get past all the crafting benches, shops, inventories, item crates and number screens as quickly as possible so you can get back to thirsting after gore and violence. I mean seriously, who is this game made for? Wait a second....
