About ten hours into playing "Dead Island 2," I began to wonder if there was any point in continuing with the game. I was waiting for some new gameplay mechanic or narrative surprise to be introduced. After another 10 hours, I was convinced. If I had not played this game for my review, I would have stopped playing long before I came to any conclusions.

Dead Island 2's biggest problem is its gameplay loop, which is more of a flat circle than a loop. You get a weapon, kill a zombie, break the weapon, get another weapon ...... And on and on. It may seem unbecoming to criticize a game, but in the case of Dead Island 2, the problem is that there is nothing outside of this loop. The game doesn't have the open world that many are expecting; instead, the map is divided into 10 different locations that you can (eventually) fast-travel around. Once you've completed the relatively short main storyline and taken care of the remaining side quests, all you have to do is move to one of these areas and kill endless respawning zombies until you quit or die of boredom.

Is it at least fun to kill zombies? All you have at the start of the game are a few key skills and a basic melee weapon. This is the part of "Dead Island 2" that I enjoyed the most, and I spent the majority of my time with the "FLESH" system. Almost every body part a zombie has can be dynamically sliced off in a visceral manner, allowing you to cut off a zombie's leg in a specific position or pop its eyeballs out with a well-placed whack to the head.

As the story progresses, this novelty soon begins to wear off. While flying zombies and their jawbones in different directions is certainly not boring, the later additions to combat do little to spice up the action. Unlocked cards buff certain skills like dodging and jump-kicking, and a throw called "curveball" can be unlocked to thwart hordes, but these upgrades are not substantial enough to offer any real variety.

I should mention at this point that "Dead Island 2" has no difficulty setting. Not every game needs a difficulty adjustment, but it seems to me that "Dead Island 2" should have had a difficulty setting. The first third of the campaign was relatively challenging, and I ran out of all my melee weapons and regularly searched for health items. Later, once I unlocked the guns, the difficulty increased to a joke. While I don't have enough ammo to burn through an entire area of the map without resupply, the gun allows me to pop a basic zombie limb with a single shot or deal critical damage to a boss enemy at a safe distance. Combine this with skill buffs and curveballs, and you can easily get out of hand; Dead Island 2 tries to balance this by increasing the number of boss enemies on the map and in the main missions, but that only serves to pad the length of the game with spongy health bars!

These specials are not only for the game, but also for the game itself.

The first encounters with these special enemies are quite fun, but they are quickly recycled into standard encounters scattered throughout the map. The first time I fought a giant crusher, it was simple but fun. While making my way through the wedding hall, I came across a zombified bride and had to fight her off while slow, romantic music played in the background. Dodging the slow, telegraphed attacks of this ferocious beast and timing my jumps to avoid being knocked to the ground was quite an impressive and interesting set piece.

The weakest element of "Dead Island 2," however, is its shoddy storyline. Throughout the short campaign, it is constantly searching for flimsy narrative excuses to visit each LA block, and there are always disposable new characters who become irrelevant as soon as the plot shifts to a new area. Most of these characters are written in a cocky, nudge-nudge, wink-wink manner that is annoying, and washed-up actors and Los Angeles socialites make up the bulk of the cast. But none of the writing is funny or witty enough to elevate these characters from their basic concepts, and none of the writing is witty enough to be acted out as satire.

It is also difficult to tell whether some of the jokes are intentionally awful in a B-movie sense or simply poorly written. More than halfway through the film, an Amazon Alexa-like device called "skope" appears. My character's decision to speak in a monotone voice so that skOpe could recognize her would have been laughable had I not been prompted three times beforehand in the in-game ads to connect my Amazon Alexa to Dead Island 2 so that I could use voice commands. I wonder if this was a cheeky dig at their own co-marketing deal, or just an attempt to appear clumsy. ...... A few of the side quests did elicit a few laughs, albeit few in number. The side quests are generally much more palatable than what the main story offers. This is because they tend to lean on absurd characters for humor and rarely fall into the messy seriousness and drama that the main storyline tends to fall into.

As for the actual content of the story missions, I can honestly say that I have never played a campaign with such a poor sense of design. Finding a battery to fix a circuit breaker or fixing a pressure sensor in a pipe is, frankly, embarrassing. Worse, your character will joke about how often you are forced to solve the same monotonous puzzles in order to move forward. I'm sure it's just a cute little self-consciousness on the part of the developers, but it only served to irritate me instead. If they know the puzzles suck, why force me to play them? I played Dead Island 2 on two separate builds [a relatively high-end build (Ryzen 9 5900X, RTX 4080, 64GB RAM) and a more modest build (i7-7820X, GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER, 16GB RAM), and both generally ran quite smooth operation. In fact, even on the more modest build, I was able to run the game with all settings set to Ultra. Button mapping and graphics settings are both relatively solid, which is useful considering that motion blur is set to high by default.

Regardless of which build I played the game with, I experienced a significant FPS drop at certain moments in the main story. During one particular section where we fought our way through a military checkpoint, the FPS dropped to the 30s (likely due to the amount of zombies on screen). In one area of the game, Beverly Hills, there was also a strange problem where the FPS dropped to the 20s every time I closed the menu, but thankfully this was fixed by simply reopening the menu. However, these problems seem to be the exception rather than the rule, and from what I have tested, the game seems to work very well on relatively old hardware.

We also encountered a few general bugs, some of which were fairly minor (e.g., resources falling into terrain before they could be picked up, or certain objects having odd collision judgments that threw them off to the other side of the map) and others that were much larger ( such as getting caught inside a wall during a cinematic attack, or not being able to progress in a particular quest). However, I never encountered a game breakdown or loss of progress that could not be fixed by a simple reload, and Dead Island 2's checkpoints and autosaves are relatively generous, so I rarely lost more than a few minutes of progress at any given moment. Apart from the admittedly excellent technical work, I can't find much reason to recommend Dead Island 2. While the combat feels responsive and intuitive, sadly, it does little to compensate for the game's numerous flaws--especially since the gameplay evolves very little during the 20-hour campaign.