It's zombie season again, but I'm not talking about the sexy zombie season that happens during the spooky season of October. Instead, it's the reawakening of a dead genre of media, the Zombie genre. It's a full decade since the previous entry of Dead Island: Riptide, so a bit of a longer refractory period than you'd expect in today's pump-out games, due to its industry -increasing development difficulties. The game proves to be an improvement from its first couple rounds, with Dead Island and the less successful Dead Island: Riptide, but it ultimately comes up a bit short of the greatness it attempts to achieve, settling instead for a being a decent, albeit beautiful romp into out not so distant past of Zombie media bukkake.
The main selling point is its improved combat to its predecessors, which is largely improved. Better physics, more enemy variety, more gore, more environmental combat, and some variety with playstyles to choose from. Unfortunately, they, by in large, all feel the same, as the base combat feels basically just like missionary with an occasional position switch for more range. Much like that missionary, sometimes are better than others, depending on how you go about it. The early and mid-games tending to be a bit rough, but I warmed up to it a bit more in the later half of the game once more perks, modifications, and better weapons became available. With using mouse and keyboards, guns were very accessible, especially the big ol' rifle you get from some fictional Hollywood star. Curveballs are just your basic various grenades, bait, and shuriken's, nothing too kinky or fun but gets the job done. Honestly, it's basically just a bit better version of the previous entries, but that's not the worst thing in the world. Much like an all-missionary porno however, there is some scripting issues. Disjointed animations, the zombie-cling on mechanic, much like Dying Light 2, is down right annoying and often times breaks the physics, as well as zombies attacking through their re-deceased brethren as they ragdoll to the ground.
Late Game Combat Mechanics
One the other hand, the main avoidance point is the writing. The story goes from serviceable but hole ridden to downright nonsensical and straight up stupid by the end. Like the intro to our missionary only porno, we're mostly going to gloss over the story, because really that's not what we're here for, we're here for the Zombie killing. The game definitely knows this as well, but it still does go a bit off the rails, with talk of extinction events hard-coded into our DNA, some supernatural elements, and the daughter being the cure from experiments in the womb, but she's like 16/17 so he developed the cure a long time ago? It's pretty much as stupid as it sounds. At least, the characters are mostly fine, with a few exceptions like Tisha, who induces eyerolling every time she's on the screen. There are six playable characters, each with a millennial or zoomer aesthetic, and they all have their own dialogues and quips while they talk to themselves while zombie killing. So, there is some variation to stories, I went with Jacob for the perks and because I'll be damned if I ever choose to play as someone who looks like fuckin' Bruno. Jacob's dialogue was a bit of a mixed bag, ranging from funny and enjoyable, to grating, pandering and annoying.
Meh Writing
The quest system is a bit of an odd note as well, in that there's not a ton, which is fine as the game ran about 23 hours for me, and would have been roughly 30 hours if I went for completionism. It was more the pacing of how quests unlocked. With the majority of side quests not opening up until late in the game, and some not until the story leaves you with blue balls, presumably to give some 'endgame' content. We can only hope it doesn't take another decade to get our rocks off and finish the many loose ends left at the end of the story. It's also worthy to make a note about an entire category of quests, the lost and found quests. Which much like a PI investigating a suspected cheating spouse, you follow around to different locations in search of clues that'll lead you to a generally unsatisfying end. The problem with them is that, while I like the idea, they however, end up being kind of tedious and never really worth the effort to do.
Lastly, is the general aesthetic and performance of our starlet. Which is by in large is fucking pretty good, and pretty fucking good. Visuals were great across the board, the Los Angeles style works pretty well, the soundtrack was solid and fun, other than some millennial and zoomer pandering it all worked together pretty well. Only hampered by framerate issues in certain areas.
In the end, if you are a fan of missionary, you'll be a fan of this, it can get the job done but it's not really going to wow everyone. It's basically just a better-than-okay sequel to its better-than-okay original. Ultimately, we're looking at a 6 out of 10, might have been more likely to give it a 7 if the ending hadn't made me want to cartoon smack and drag my hand down my face and just turn the game off. There's some fun here, and some annoyance, if you liked the original then go for it, else you should probably wait for a sale.