Anyone have any thoughts on Dead Island 2? I've heard on this site that it's apparently a pretty solid game, but I does anyone here know the amount of woke crap that undoubtedly got crammed into the plot?
I picked it up in the current Steam sale ($30 right now) and started playing it because I'm a fan of the first two games.
Despite it taking place in contemporary Los Angeles, which is a real-life Woke Singularity, it isn't QUITE as woke as I expected it to be. Don't get me wrong, there's definitely wokeshit in the game, as all but one of the playable protags are some kind of tattoo-covered dyed-hair girlboss or mystery meat mutt, and the one white dude protag is a male stripper who freaks out at everything (at least at first).
Instead of extolling the virtues of LA, the game takes the piss out of it like GTA V: almost everyone you meet is a vapid self-absorbed moron, and the game constantly pokes fun at how useless these people are not just in a zombie apocalypse, but in general. I also heard remarkably little dialogue about Fucking White Males
or race or gender, or class warfare or whatever. Dialogue is largely either said airheads complaining about how they cannot adjust without modern conveniences, or the protags who are justifiably focused on surviving and escaping LA, or the occasional comment about how the government has basically left everyone in LA to die.
Another surprising thing is that the only couples I've seen so far on-screen are heterosexual, which given it's LA you'd figure they might as well make everyone gay. Most of these relationships are interracial, one of which is between a black man and white woman, but said black man is Sam B from the previous game and I have a soft spot for him ("Who Do You Voodoo Bitch" is so bad it's good). I'm also happy to say they didn't rewrite his personality to suit any agendas, he's the same character from 1 and Riptide, just not the protagonist anymore.
Gameplay wise, I'm enjoying it. Where Dying Light 2 went in the wrong direction and got way too bloated for its own good, this game stays true to the formula of the original game and gives you a smaller, but more tightly-designed world. The real attraction of the combat is the EXTREME gore; I'm pretty sure it's procedurally generated, as you can strip skin in multiple places, bash brains out of skulls, spill intestines and more with the zombies in this game to a level of detail I haven't seen in any other game. You can have a lot of fun just wailing on zombies and watching them get ripped to shreds in many different ways (that said, the counterattacks only have one animation per weapon type, so they will get repetitive pretty quickly).
So yeah, there's no parkour or fancy combos like in Dying Light, but that's fine. It also isn't the least bit scary, unlike Dying Light, and while I'm nowhere near done with the game I have a feeling the combat loop will start to get samey after a while. For $30, I can't complain about zombie smashing.
Additional note: when the game says you need an Epic Store account, you can just skip it and it won't bother you again about it.
My woke rating would be a low
Medium.
