Virtual 100 – Game 17
After finally wrapping up on God of War Ragnarok, a game that too much, much longer than I expected, I decided to start hammering away on some of my shorter experiences. That meant side-lining games like Starfield and Cyberpunk 2077 and focusing on some of the more streamlined stories I had sitting on my hard drive.
I didn’t really intend to focus on Dead Island 2. I own the game on PC, but with it being a recent Game Pass release on Xbox, I decided to give it a download and see how it compared with my PC rig (which isn’t the beefiest). To be honest, my rig holds up fairly well, though I usually set my resolution to 1080p to match my monitor. The Xbox version had the luxury of being set to output to 4k on my television, so it naturally looked a little bit better than what I was getting out of my PC.
That said, the tinkering turned into a few hours’ play session, and after that it was just a shrug and a sigh and the admission to myself that I might as well just keep playing it and save my PC copy for a rainy day.
So play it I did, and guess what… I actually enjoyed it quite a bit. This wasn’t entirely unexpected; I was actually hoping it would carry the trend started by the original Dead Island and Dying Light (Dying Light 2… not so much). And it did. Despite the development hell it was mired in for so long, the game actually turned out pretty damn good.
This isn’t much of a surprise, as most of the reviews out there have already said as much. But, as we all know, my experiences and opinions don’t always line up with the general consensus. You can take a gander at the aforementioned God of War write-up for an example of that.
But alas, I finished up the story on Dead Island 2 last night and overall it was a pretty good time. That doesn’t mean I don’t have my gripes though. Because what kind of gamer would I be if I didn’t complain about something?
To be fair, most of my criticisms don’t really have to do with the gameplay, or the graphics. They more or less fall into some of the technical quirks, writing, and kinda strange design choices I came across during my playthrough.
My first biggest laugh/groan came from the colorful cast of characters to choose from. I personally call this the McDonald’s Effect, harkening to any McDonald’s commercial and the perfectly balanced diversity of any particular group of friends enjoying a meal together. Do I have a problem with diversity? Nope. Do I think this ever an accurate portrayal of any group of friends ever? Hardly. It’s more of an observation that I get a chuckle out of every now and then, and it got one out of me here as well.
That said, the groan came from the cast of characters themselves. I can honestly say that I didn’t really want to play as any one of them. The first character I chose to play as was the Hispanic girl. Her name is Carla (because of course it is) and she has a really thick accent (because of course she does.)
I played using Carla for about an hour, through the opening portion of the game where she escapes the plane wreckage and makes her way toward Emma Jaunt’s mansion. I got there, played one more mission, and then… I couldn’t take it anymore.
Edited— I removed about four large paragraphs where I basically bitched about how badly Hispanics are stereotyped in video games.
So I started over with the generic white guy, because I figured hey, he was probably going to be about as bland and forgettable as possible, and for the most part he was. I do have to give the voice actor props though. That guy really hammed it up. I really thought he was a firefighter when I chose him, and I was like, cool I will play as a guy who is already kind of a hero in normal life, and now the zombie apocalypse will allow him to elevate and be a leader in an even more extreme circumstance.
But no, it turns out he was a male stripper, and the firefighter outfit was his stripper costume. I guess I should have known better in a game like this, and when I realized it, it didn’t really surprise me. Not that it really changed anything. The voice acting overall was pretty good. Maybe I didn’t give Carla’s character a chance to grow on me, but man, as a partial Hispanic, who grew up in a very Hispanic culture, it was cringey to me. Maybe the mileage varies to other people, but yeah, anyways, I’m starting to get into that whole diatribe that I removed above, so I’ll move on.
As far as the graphics go, holy shit this game looks amazing. I’m not sure what voodoo they were who-doing, but damn they have a solid engine on their hands right now, and I really hope they do more with it. How they got the game to look that good on consoles and run at a solid 60 is beyond me, and some of these other developers need to sit up and take notice. Especially Techland. Seriously Techland, this studio, who got didn’t even get this dev-hell of a game on sloppy-seconds, but thirsty-thirds, just beat you at your own shit. I played Dying Light 2 by constantly flipping back and forth between performance mode and quality mode because the trade-offs for each made it hard to decide on one or the other, and “balanced” mode never really felt all that balanced. But DI2 didn’t even make me want to open the settings. It looked great and ran great and I played through the entire game without feeling like I was missing out on anything. That’s the way you do it.
If only the gameplay itself impressed me as much. Like I said above, as much as I liked the game, I had some gripes. Most of them are minor but there’s a big one that really annoyed me after a while.
I guess one of the ways they were able to keep the game running so smooth was by scrapping literally anything that wasn’t on the screen. The game does not keep track of anything that is not in front of your character’s eyes. There are magically spawning— and de-spawning— enemies at every turn. That means sometimes getting attacked by a zombie in a corner of an area where there were no zombies just a second ago. This happened a lot, and it did get kind of irritating from time to time. This usually happened when clearing an area and thinking I was safe for a moment, only to realize I wasn’t safe. This isn’t as big of a problem in single player, when you can hit the pause button, but in co-op multiplayer, when pause won’t stop the action, this might possibly mean having to leave a button on look-out if you need to take a bathroom break.
This constant enemy spawning does make the combat a bit tedious though, because in the early parts of the game, your weapons are pretty shitty. They don’t last long, and that means constant trips to a workbench for repairs. When zombies are respawning literally every time you turn around, those weapons can get worn down pretty damn quick. It isn’t as much of a problem once you get additional mods to enhance the durability of weapons, and have a nice collection of different weapons types in your arsenal, but in the early going it can be a slight pain in the ass.
One of the nice things about the game, and maybe this is the old man in me talking, is that there really is no “Game Over.” If you die, you’ll simply respawn down the street. Story progress doesn’t get reset, and even the zombies or bosses that killed you still have whatever health remaining on the health bar. For someone like myself who doesn’t always necessarily want a high degree of challenge in his games, this was a really nice change of pace. The game isn’t really difficult, even if death did have consequences, but I did die a few times either from carelessness or not having a good enough stock of weaponry.
I know I did die a time or two because my weapon mod killed me. As in, I had an electric weapon, and I attacked a zombie, and we were both standing in a body of water. If that zombie gets electrified, guess what! Your ass is getting zapped too.
A lot of times this happened without my realizing it. There were so many times I was standing in oil or backing away from a flaming enemy only to bump up against an exploding barrel. It happened, and it was stupid. But because there was very little consequence in death, what would’ve been a rage-inducing moment was reduced to a shrug or maybe a quick, frustrated shout.
Speaking of mods, one thing that really did annoy me was if you have a weapon with a certain mod effect, any enemy that already has that effect will not be damaged by that weapon. At all. Which is weird.
I understand that attacking a flaming zombie with a flaming sword will not do fire damage. I’ve been playing games long enough to know that’s gonna happen before I even attempt it. But it’s still a bladed weapon. It should still do some damage. The fact that it’s fire on fire completely negated any physical aspect of the weapon, and that was annoying. Especially when I had a zombie with an ounce of health and it just needs a quick smack with literally anything to kill it, and I need to swap over to a completely different weapon in order to damage it. Sometimes that could be a quick tap of the button, but in my case I would carry multiple weapons of certain types, and that would mean opening the weapon wheel just so I didn’t have to keep tapping the button to cycle through. It wasn’t as huge of an issue as I’m making it sound here, but when you have a horde of zombies coming at you, and three of them are on fire, one of them keeps dispersing a burst of electricity, and four of them are spitting acid at you from a distance, the rock-paper-scissors of the weapons gets tedious. Just let me do reduced damage to some of them so I can keep the action going. That’s all I ask.
I enjoyed Dead Island 2 a lot, which didn’t really surprise me much because, as I mentioned at the start, I really enjoyed the first Dead Island as well as both Dying Lights. But I do feel like I robbed myself of a little bit of the enjoyment by trying to get through it and move on to other games. There was once a time when I would have tried to find all the weapon schematics, do all the side stuff, unlock all the doors, etc. And, while I did a few of the side missions, I stuck pretty strictly to the main story. When I did complete it, I admit I had the desire to stick around and explore the areas a bit more, without the ever-pressing urge to move the story forward. And maybe I will. One day.
But for now it’s getting scratched off of the backlog and I’m on to the next thing. I’m still only seventeen games into my hundred-game project. It’s a long, long road. I hope I don’t run out of gas.
