All weekend I’ve been playing Dead Island 2. It’s a really fun game in my opinion. I beat it earlier this year but I played the entirety of it over cloud streaming. It came to console game pass earlier this year but not to my aging Xbox One so my only way to play it was over the Cloud. It worked fairly well apart from some annoying visual artifacts, but now I can play it natively on my PC. Overall it runs very well with FSR 2 enabled.
The best part of the game is the combat. Melee weapons feel very weighty and powerful. Guns, while they don’t feel the best, can be very helpful in tight situations. The loot loop of finding new weapons, scraping bad ones, then upgrading your powerful ones is simple but satisfying. You really do need to constantly switch out weapons or spend money to level them up as you do, so some people may be turned off by that but it keeps me engaged and constantly making sure my weapons are at their peak performance.
The world and graphics are very nice as well. It’s not a full open world, but instead there are a good handful of large open maps with lots of secrets and side quests all throughout. The maps will be full of locked garages that require fuses to open which you can find or buy, locked doors/safes that requires keys hidden in the map, and lots of side quests for you to randomly stumble upon. I personally find the side quests tend to have more interested stories than the main story, perhaps because they are much more condensed and focused. They are usually entertaining to pay attention to.
You can play the campaign in co-op with friends or strangers. I find it very fun to keep the lobby open to public and wait for a random to join me. Most of the time the random player likes to stick together which makes for a fun time bashing zombies heads in together.
What I really played the most this weekend was the new Neighborhood Watch game mode just introduced two weeks ago. Essentially it’s a co-op roguelite game mode. You can play solo or up to three players. In a smaller condensed map, you are tasked with finishing a mission then returning to base with all weapons and materials you collect along the way. There are 5 days total, the first four days you finish missions in the city then on the fifth and final day you must defend this big house from five waves of zombies.
The very first day chooses the mission randomly. Each day after that you must vote between three missions, all of which give different rewards. Each mission you complete can give you rewards from some good weapons, perks that buff you and your teammates, to traps that help defend the house on day five. When you return from a mission, you are given about 5 minutes in the safe house to work on your loadout. There is also a vending machine that resets each day with different weapons and crafting mods.
I’ve played this game mode for about 6 hours total over the weekend, it’s so much fun. It’s fairly simple but it’s got an addicting gameplay loop. I haven’t had any issue trying to find people online which is awesome. In a weird way it reminds me a lot of those random multiplayer gamemodes tacked onto the side of a single player game that actually ended up being a ton of fun like the first couple of Assassins Creed games. It’s unnecessary but I’m very glad they added it and it turned out fun. There is even its own progression meter for each of the three characters so you have more to work towards, plus you also get unlocks in the campaign which is awesome.