![]() And although putting the attack button on the analogue trigger was a strange design decision that makes combat feel sluggish, you still get the gutsy thrill of slicing the odd leg or head off. You’ll enjoy using the Curveball items – a range of projectile weapons, including bombs with different triggers and detonation styles – to explode groups of your slobbering foes. You’ll enjoy running into a room filled with gurning zombies, kicking a couple over then eviscerating their mates with a samurai blade. Such systemic carnage is sadly overlooked here.Īnd yet Dead Island 2 is a lot of fun. But, although you can string attacks together to multiply effects, you don’t get cool toys like the energy leashes in Bulletstorm that grab and drag enemies toward you, or the intricate environmental traps of Days Gone, which let you booby trap whole areas of the map. You’ve basically got bladed weapons, bludgeoning weapons and then (slightly ineffectual) guns, as well as things in the environment that explode. But for a hack-n-slasher that focuses on melee combat, it is also achingly short on interesting ways to kill stuff. OK, fine, this isn’t a full-on role-playing game and it never wanted to be. Although you unlock new skills as you progress (via a hugely simplified collectible card game interface), you can’t directly level up elements such as health or stamina, and you can’t even change your outfit or appearance, so there’s little sense of intrinsic character progression. This lack of emotional pull is accentuated by the fact that there’s not much you can do to progress your character in meaningful, trackable ways. Consequently, Los Angeles feels like a theme park rather than a real place, which I guess could be satire, but then it doesn’t make for an immersive world. You can’t simply wander the world as you can in say, Dying Light or Days Gone because all the sections are gated off and you have to “fast travel” between them. Most of the main areas are in fact highly enclosed hubs that force you along distinct narrative routes and barely ever incentivise you to go off-piste and explore. The game is billed as an open-world adventure, but the world is not really that open or indeed that adventurous. This one shambles, but this one runs! This one explodes! This one projectile vomits acid! We have been competing against this roster of undead enemy archetypes for 20 years, using the same weapons, customised on the same goddamn workbenches. This is a game in which all you really do is pick up weapons, modify them in safehouse locations (using components you’ve discovered in the environment) and then use them to bludgeon zombies that come in achingly familiar stereotypes. Dead Island 2 feels like a relic from that era, exhumed and reanimated with very little acknowledgment that titles such as Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, The Last of Us, Assassin’s Creed Origins, God of War and Elden Ring have very much moved the dial on. The problem is action-adventure games have evolved quite a lot since 2012. In between crushing the skulls of a thousand undead monsters, you also meet survivors – mostly stoners, preppers and superstar influencers – who all have a part to play in the emerging story.Ĭrushing the skulls of the LA undead … Dead Island 2. ![]() At the start you choose one of six characters, all with differing stats and special abilities, and while attempting to escape the city you must solve the mystery of how the contagion came about and whether or not there’s a cure. The sequel shifts the action to a post-zombie-apocalypse version of Los Angeles, where the narrative stumbles between sprawling Beverly Hills mansions, Hollywood movie sets and sunny beaches. It’s a credit to everyone involved that it actually functions as a finished product, albeit one that shows the scars of its troubled gestation. German studio Yager had three years on the project before publisher Deep Silver passed it on to Sumo Digital for another three years until it washed up with Dambusters, Deep Silver’s own in-house studio. ![]() Work on a sequel to 2011 zombie adventure Dead Island began in 2012, but the project has since been through at least three development studios on its tortured route to release. Once in a while, the story behind a game’s development is more epic than anything being shown on screen. ![]()
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