I don't know how long I'll make this but I want to write about Dead Island 2 because, by all accounts, this game shouldn't even exist, let alone be as good as it is. When was the last time that happened? When has that ever happened? Something that's been in development for over a decade through multiple developers and comes out the other end as not just a playable thing but something so fun and charming until its very last moment?
I finished the game after about 22 hours of mostly mainlining the story but doing about a third of the sidequests. It was almost distracting how much, the entire time, I kept thinking "How am I still having this much fun?" I kept waiting for the game to like, blindside me by just some bullshit story twist or new mechanic that made things worse or, like the first game, shift to being entirely a first-person shooter set in claustrophobic levels that feel completely at odds with what made the earlier game so fresh and fun.
But it never happened! It stayed fun the whole way through. There's just so much to pick apart about why that was the case. I'm not a great writer for this kind of stuff. I just want to put it down on paper somewhere.
The worldbuilding in DI2 is great. Everything is really thought-through and connected with itself in a way that surprised me because it always feels like such an afterthought in any large AAA game. Like, you see a billboard in a game or whatever and you're like ah that's a good fake luxury car ad or whatever but you don't think about it again. DI2 has a really small but world for this stuff but everything is populated everywhere else. The fast food places offer delivery through the same fake Uber Eats service that zombie runners will run at you with, backpack and all. TV actors from DVD sets lying around some houses are characters in the game later and aren't introduced as being from TV letting you connect those dots first, or having click later when you do spot a poster and go "Oh shit, that's the guy from the hotel!". It feels like a world! That stuff matters, even the small details! It's the difference between seeing a cardboard set and believing that cardboard set is a real place for a moment and time, you know?
It really helps that the way Dead Island 2 treats its characters, like, sells the 'you exist in this world but aren't the center of it' feeling? Stuff moves around you. Things happen and are communicated to you after the fact. A lot of characters just 'show up' because you're actually the one who's just showing up to all these places and they're not taking the time to introduce themselves to you, to lore dump and all of that shit. The writing is mostly okay, I wouldn't say it was ever anything worth highlighting in of itself, but paired with how the characters exist in the world it gets a way stronger sense of reality that I think other games have to work really hard for because the story is so focused on your journey.
This kinda extends to the humor in the game, too. This is a way more subjective part and also I'm old so, yknow, your mileage may vary but the hitrate on the jokes was pretty good! It probably helps that it came out the same year as games like Forspoken where there's just tremendous fatigue on the "I'm sorry, I have to do WHAT?" style of humor. There's kinda none of that, there's no like... cynical humor? Refreshing. Like there's cracking jokes at the immediate situation and it's quippy but because the aforementioned worldbuilding and the general like... vibe of the game it kinda hits more than it doesn't! And when it doesn't, it doesn't come off as cringe or anything it's just kinda corny. Which is totally fine. Like it clicked into place when I was streaming it in Discord last night and a friend compared the humor in the game to early-GTA games where you could kinda chuckle at it and be like Haha Alright instead of GTA V where you're just like "Hmm, actual adults really did sit down and write this huh".
It never overstays its welcome pretty much in every regard and that is especially so for the open world. It's small! Areas are broken up into kinda concentrated zones and the way the story its paced makes every area, like, just big enough that you can break away and explore a bit, dense enough that you're rewarded for it, and small enough that you can pretty briskly get back on track and move onto a new area that starts that cycle over again. You come back to zones later, there's new stuff, you can open new passages... It's really well put together and the density makes the places with restricted access compelling to get to because it's not lost in the weeds amongst like... the cacophony of bullshit that plagues other open world games.
Which that part, I think, is the thing that has stuck with me throughout the entire game. I wasn't just never bored, I was never tired. Your characters have stats, they're meaningless. The weapons have stats, they're largely irrelevant. You level up, you unlock new skills, and the skills have no metrics whatsoever. There's no +5% to this, +10 to that. You get a new skill, you can drop kick now. You equip another skill, drop kicks now send guys flying. If you have this card equipped, your stamina refills slower but your health regenerates. There's either a very direct cause-and-effect or there's just a very flat "you do this now" to every unlockable or ability in the game and it's SO refreshing. You're never thinking about stats, you're just thinking about what new thing you can do to the enemies you're chopping down. There's loot rarity and loot numbers and all that but again: largely meaningless. Is the number bigger than the last one? It deals more damage. And even that stops mattering at some point because it becomes more about the mods you're strapping onto stuff.
The mods are hyper-simplified from the original games, which again I think is tremendously to its benefit. This hits harder, this breaks slower, this attacks faster. There's no +10% to anything! Visible, at least. I'm sure there is under the hood. But I mean you're not told those numbers because it doesn't matter because when you do craft a mod you can feel the effect immediately. Like the skills, all that stuff has a very clear result and it makes experimenting with the game's sandbox so much more fun! AAA games are so fucking cringe now from forcing you to spend like 40% of your time in an inventory screen managing loot and shit and never meaningfully encouraging you to mess around with its systems for it. You're never focused on what could be fun, you become focused on what's more efficient because there's so many visible metrics and numbers that your goal is to optimize not experiment.
And it works so much in Dead Island 2 because the reduced complexity in its combat system (RIP advanced targeting) is replaced instead with simplified elemental mechanics. You're kinda Breath of the Wild-ing some encounters by just like, spotting parts of the world around enemies and thinking oh I can lure these guys here and grab this Fire Hammer I have and chuck it which will cause this gas to ignite and explode and send those guys flying either to fully kill them or toss em to the ground so you can stomp them/hit them. There's a bit later in the game where I solved a puzzle by shooting a nailgun into a waterpipe and turning the waterpipe on to have the newly formed leak extinguish fire that was blocking my path. That's absolutely how the puzzle was meant to be solved but I felt like I outsmarted the game doing that and those moments are so cool. They're so much more engaging and satisfying than unnecessary number optimization. It makes me excited to come back to this game to finish the rest of the side quests and terrified of starting a new of-this-era open world game because I know I'm just immediately gonna get bogged down in numbers and hand-holding and shit. Let me have fun! Let me fuck around and find out!
I really wanted to just jot all of these thoughts down because I'd been quietly gushing to myself about it for the past weeks. I've been playing in the evenings while hanging out on Discord with friends and people were always so surprised when I was glowing about the experience every time. I didn't want to leave those thoughts to the ether of those moments. I can't recommend the game enough. Play it if you want a fun co-op experience, play it if you want to fuck around in an open-world game for a while with a podcast on in the BG or something, play it if you want a fun sandbox to goof off in, play it if you want to have fun with a goddamn videogame for once instead of feeling like you're doing Game Design Homework half the time.
