As there is no doubt in the minds of those who have played Dead Island 2, zombies in the game don’t just die, but they also perform as well. I feel as though they are bursting and rupturing, spinning like pinwheels through the air with bones broken and jutting out at ugly angles from their limbs as they tumble through the air like pinwheels. It is as though they have ruptured and broken. They stare at the ground as their jaws flap loosely, hanging lopsided on a last strip of skin as their eyes hang loosely from sockets before rolling around rotting cheeks on a shred of nervous tissue. There is a bowed head on their shoulders and they are staring at the ground. Moreover, one of the best things about these weapons is that they melt, with acid-based weapons sloughing flesh and muscle from bone like an angry candle when it is blown out with a blow torch. In the process of losing the structure and power they need to walk, their mass slowly drains away, to the point where they are able to collapse like a bundle of sticks when they try to take a step that they are no longer able to finish because of their lack of physical mass.
The only thing I have to say about the game is that, to be honest, I found myself having a few problems with melting zombies near the midpoint of the game, and that alone was the most frustrating thing for me. As the weather has been nothing short of gloriously wet and horrible, I am left with a small arsenal of acid-only weapons, perfecting the art of stacking just enough damage to cause victims to simply melt away instead of being killed outright from such damage. It has to be said that there was one thing that prevented me from completely playing this as a 30-hour simulation of zombies liquefying, and that is the fact that the enemies are acid resistant, and that prevented me from completely enjoying the game. All right, that’s fine with me. Let me try something else instead of this…
Despite being an intriguing game, Dead Island 2 does require you to accept that 95% of the time you will be hit with zombie sticks (and only 5% will be choosing which sticks to use) and the remaining 5% will be deciding which stick to use. There is no doubt that this is a game of simple pleasures, but one that accomplishes well by making the most of what it can do with those simple pleasures to maximize the game’s enjoyment. At first, I was blown away by the restraint, which the program shows in giving you the option of metering out the choices you have available to you. There are just a few cadavers and a plank that you are given as your first weapon, and the bulk of the game’s early weight is carried by nothing more than its good looks and sheer novelty in just how much muck you can make out of just a few cadavers and a plank.
This will grow over time, adding a variety of different types of weapons and elemental options, including things like guns and throwable weapons such as grenades and molotovs, as well as a growing set of skill cards that you can use to upgrade your character’s abilities. Aside from allowing you to unlock and fine-tune special attacks such as dropkicks and ground pounds/slams, you can also use rage mode to unleash power when it gets crowded and unleash things such as ground pounds and slams.
