Video Gamers Podcast - Delightful Dead Island 2 Deep Dive - Gaming Podcast

Episode Date: May 1, 2023

Gaming zombie slayers Paul and Josh wading into the zombie hordes and bringing you our gaming deep dive for Dead Island 2. This video game 9 years in the making has had troubled gaming development, but is the end product worth your time and money? We break it all down for you in this week's amazing episode from your favorite video game podcast! Thanks to our LEGENDARY supporters: Gideon Is Lit, Toro, Scrump, Gaius, Remi, MarbleMadness, Dr. Catatonic, Blackstar (DQ), Glapsuidir, Phelps, Michele B, Redletter, Nevo, Waynerman, TFolls, AceofShame, Jake, RangerMiller, and Ad Video games covered this week:  Dead Island 2 Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/multiplayerpodcast Join our Gaming Discord: https://discord.gg/Dsx2rgEEbz Follow us on Instagram: instagram.com/multiplayerpod/ Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/MultiplayerPod Subscribe to us on YouTube: youtube.com/channel/UCU12YOMnAQwqFZEdfXv9c3Q  Visit us on the web: multiplayerpodcast.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You hear that? Ugh, paid. And done. That's the sound of bills being paid on time. But with the BMO Eclipse Rise Visa Card, paying your bills could sound like this. Yes! Earn rewards for paying your bill in full and on time each month.

Rise to rewards with the BMO Eclipse Rise Visa Card. Terms and conditions apply. TD Direct Investing offers live support. So whether you're a newbie or a seasoned pro, you can make your investing steps count. And if you're like me and think a TFSA stands for Total Fund Savings Adventure, maybe reach out to TD Direct Investing. hello fellow gamers welcome to hell a where the walking dead have been set loose and the whole

city's on lockdown today we are going to be deep diving one of the longest waited for sequels dead island 2 i am your host and joining me he's just one of the blue crab for sequels, Dead Island 2. I am your host and joining me, he's just one of the blue crab boys. He just wants to enjoy some decent food in the solitude of his restaurant. It's Josh. I feel like that's where I would want to hole up, man, is in a really good, ultra clean restaurant for all the stuff that's going on outside and just eat some crab legs. They're very chill, very very laid back it kind of seemed like your vibe yeah yeah i definitely wouldn't want to be the one guy but uh yeah other than the one yeah other than the one blue crab boy all right so today we are deep diving dead island 2 i know our listeners might be a little confused

because we have our regular schedule we always go back and forth on Mondays between deep dives and bonus rounds. We just had a deep dive last week. We should be due for a bonus round. But, Josh, what happened? Is this where you're going to make fun of me again, Paul? I played the whole game in two days, Paul. Yes, you beat this whole game in two days paul yes you you beat this whole game in two days and i thought i better beat this quick that way josh doesn't completely forget everything in this game and then we both finished it so quick so we're like all right we'll get this one out sooner than later so instead of waiting a whole extra week why

not just do it today yeah we in all you know in all seriousness, getting a game review out as soon as possible is definitely beneficial to the listeners. We try to do that. We also always make sure we put in enough play time in a game to be able to talk about it and actually give a recommendation on it as well. In this case, we both beat it fairly quickly. And we went, you know what? Let's get this review out there so people can make a decision on whether they want to play this game or buy this game or not. So that's why you're getting back to back deep dives. And not going to lie, we both wanted to start Star Wars Jedi Survivors. There was a little bit of a motivation. I was trying to sound like we

were doing this for the listeners, Paul. It's win-win. It's football. Yes, there we go. All right. Before we start that deep dive, Josh, can you tell the people a little bit about why they might want to consider supporting us on Patreon? Because this show is listener-funded. If you love the podcast and you want it to keep going, we do need your support. These games get expensive. We put a lot of time and effort into the podcast. You know, we love doing it. But honestly, the show is 100% listener funded. So, you know,

if you like what you hear, if you've been a listener for a long time, we really could use your support. You can sign up for as little as $5 a month. That's not a day. That's a month. So it's super cheap to be able to help this podcast continue on. You can do that over at MultiplayerSquad.com. Now, on top of being an awesome person and bringing podcast joy to the rest of the world, we also say, hey, thanks, man. And we give you two fantastic bonus episodes every month. You get early access. So episodes a day early, you get ad free episodes. So if you hate hitting access so episodes a day early you get ad free episodes so if you hate hitting that 30 second skip button you don't have to do that

anymore you get a cool recognition in our discord server with like special privileges and name colors and all that stuff and on top of all that we will shout you out on an episode when you join we sure will and we also want to thank our current legendary supporters gaius214 and red letter along with epic supporters ace of shame casmon yoda papa thunderfist remilia master wayne 01 and last but certainly not least michael the butler so along with the slew of rare supporters as well but we always like to give occasional shout outs to legendary and epic all right i think we're good to go josh let's pick up those bulldozer baseball bats and start swinging for the fences felt wrong not to swing because it's time to

deep dive dead island 2 here's the description of the game from gamestop.com because this one's not on steam the much-loved zombie saga is back dead island 2 is a unique formula of horror dark humor and over-the-top zombie slaying spanning an epic pulp adventure this thrilling first-person action rpg takes players across a brand new playground a hell hellish vision of LA, or Helle, as we like to call it. Dead Island 2 is stylish, vibrant, and flooded with zombie infection. Explore iconic, gore-trenched LA, meet larger-than-life characters, and slay countless foes in exquisitely bloody detail, and evolve to become the ultimate zombie slayer. Alright, now in this episode, we are going to avoid all major story spoilers, but we

are going to talk about weapons and abilities, things that unlock over the course of the game. I don't think anything that we're going to talk about would spoil the experience for anyone, but at the same time, we won't divulge any twists or turns or conclusions to the main story, and that way everyone kind of knows what to expect. All right. So without going into any detail on story here, basically when the game starts, you get to pick one of six playable characters. There is a zombie outbreak around LA. You're fighting for survival. The plot is really nothing all that creative. In fact,

if you've ever seen a zombie movie or played any zombie game, you can probably guess the plot from beginning to end. It plays on a lot of the same tropes that you see in other zombie IP. But Josh, for people who are maybe new to the Dead Island series of games, how would you describe the mood and the atmosphere? What does it feel like to play Dead Island? Well, first of all, that's me because I never played Dead Island 1. So I had no idea what to expect on this, man. The atmosphere of this game, I would describe as happy horror. Which is weird. It's like the collapse of of society but it's weirdly positive and optimistic the whole way yes i was gonna say like either sunshiny horror happy horror or like comedy horror if you're trying to mix like genres i like sunshine horror yeah that's a term we should coin

okay well that's what i'm calling it then because i that is legitimately the best way I can describe this game. Dude, that's so funny. I don't know if the different characters play differently, because I only played as Carla. But this entire game, it does not matter what gruesome deaths are happening around her or how bleak things look. She is the most positive person I've ever known in a video game. She's actually enjoying and reveling in killing zombies the whole way. I mean, this game is just, hey, it's fun to bash zombies. Let's just do it for the next 20 hours, and it's going to be an absolute blast. And that's really basically what it is. I mean, it's even filled with parody of zombie movies and stuff. There's this whole

running joke where instead of the Oscars, they have the Romeros, which is a nod to George Romero, who is the father of zombie films. So it's very meta. It really just celebrates all things zombies. And it's in not a dark way, like Resident Evil is always much more dark and depressing and things like that. Let's just have fun killing zombies. It is the most optimistic zombie game that I think I've ever seen, to be honest. You're right. And we play different characters, but my character was exactly the same way. And I was almost like, I'd like to think this is how I would approach the zombie apocalypse. It'd be like, guys, guys, it's going to be fine. We'll just go out and slaughter a few thousand zombies. We'll have a good time. We'll hit the beach. It'll be great. So in an interview with gamesindustry.biz, the game director, whose name is David Stenton,

he was asked, there are so many zombie games out there. How is this going to stand apart from things like the Resident Evil series the last of us series and this is what he said i am a massive fan of those other franchises there is room for that kind of narrative and that kind of heavy hitting take on things but likewise sometimes you just want to sit down and watch a saturday night blockbuster and go on a roller coaster ride through amazing locations and meet really fun, interesting people and kill zombies with awesome weapons. And I think that's exactly what they delivered. I think that's what they delivered for sure. All right. So here's a little bit of context about the history of Dead

Island. The very first entry was announced in 2006. It got delayed a couple of times from 2008 all the way back to 2011. That game does actually take place on an island, in case anyone's curious, now that we are no longer on an island in Dead Island 2. I did play the first entry on Xbox 360. I remember there being a ton of hype. I remember the game being a great idea, but I remember feeling a little disappointed in how it ran. They also released a standalone expansion called Riptide

in 2013, which I never played. And then Dead Island 2 was announced in 2014 as an eight-player cooperative multiplayer game, and it was supposed to release in 2015. And all of a sudden now, with several delays and also multiple switching of developing teams, we now have the game nine years after announcement. And normally when you see a game delayed for nine years, you would expect the game to be an absolute mess. Did this game feel to you like it was stuck in development hell for almost a decade? Or did it feel like just a normal average game i it felt like a normal game to me man i i legitimately we you know we're we were aware of the development issues on this game i mean there was a bunch of articles and stories that covered that and i didn't know what to expect

um you know we covered the flesh system which we'll get into here in a little bit and stuff like that but you But there was this almost like cloud over this game before it released, where people were like, this game's been in development hell for so long. There's no way that it's going to come out and be cohesive or coherent. It's going to be buggy. It's going to be a mess. And I'll be honest, man, I didn't get any of that. I'm honestly more shocked to hear that they announced it in 2014 and we're aiming for a 2015 release. Who does that? You're going to announce a game and release it one year later? Come on, man. That just doesn't happen anymore. You got

to give us that five years of hype. Yeah. It's really interesting because sometimes you'll watch a movie or play a game and you can tell like, oh, these are completely different people who wrote this part or that part and it feels almost stitched together or trying to make this Frankenstein's monster cohesive and it's really not. I guess when I was reading some of the research about the development here, they basically scrapped everything in 2018. They said, we don't care all the work done before we're starting from the ground up. And I guess damn buster is the studio that actually finalized this game.

They basically said, Hey, we love the idea that it's set in California, but we're going to start brand new from zero. And I thought that the game felt very cohesive. And from a technical standpoint i don't know about you josh this game ran nearly flawlessly for me i i had one little tiny bug in one area but other than that one thing it ran perfectly fine for me it ran really well for me

too um that is one thing that is sadly a breath of fresh air nowadays. Yeah. Because... Take notes, Star Wars Jedi Survivor. Yeah, I was just about to say, you and I have both dipped our toes in a Jedi Survivor, and there definitely are some performance issues with that game going on. Now, thankfully, they're not game-breaking, for me at least,

but I know there's a lot of people out there that are having a big issue with Jedi Survivor right now. So with Dead Island 2, it's nice because we're almost to the point where we kind of expect hitching, stuttering, dropped frame rates, crashing, all this stuff. And I'll be honest, man, I can't think of a time where if I ran into a bug or I ran into an issue, it was so minor that I honestly can't remember it at this point.

So for me, this is one of the more technically sound games that I've played in a while. Which really surprised me because I was really worried if they're taking, you know, like 14 years of code and putting it all together. There's no way it's going to run well. But yeah, this is a quality product. I was very pleasantly surprised. All right, let's get into what everyone cares about most with dead island 2 let's talk about combat and i think this is going to be a little lengthier than we normally talk about combat because it's just like the sole focus of this game

i do have uh one last quote here from david stenton i think this kind of sets the stage of what what was like the philosophy behind dead island dead Island 2 is all about those what-if conversations in the pub. Like, what weapon would you use in a zombie apocalypse? I'd use a garden rake or wolverine claws or sledgehammers. It's all about reveling in the obliteration and slaying of zombies in the most bloody and spectacular ways. It's like that homage to 80s horror movies. It's so disgusting that you almost burst out laughing by the end of it.

All right, so in this game, a lot of the combat does revolve around wild weaponry. In the beginning, you only have access to melee weapons. So there's things like golf clubs, baseball bats, cleavers, katanas, you know, stuff like that. They're all divided into four categories, which I thought was kind of interesting. They basically divide into maiming, which helps cut off individual limbs, frenzy, which has high attack speed, bulldozer, which are heavy attacks with force that push back enemies, and headhunter, which gives boosts when targeting zombie heads. I thought this was kind of a neat wrinkle to melee weapons. What'd you think?

It's funny because I didn't even notice that there were different classes of weapons until I was like three hours into this game. Now, that's not to say that a baseball bat felt different than a knife. Yes, they felt different. But at one point, I was looking at a weapon that I had found and I'm like, what is this frenzy thing? Like, what? Frenzy? Wait, is that specific to this weapon? Is it specific to my character? So you could tell I was just going around slaughtering zombies all willy-nilly before I kind of went, what does this mean? And that's when I was like, oh, okay. And I started to pay attention at that point. And then I realized like, oh, I actually do care about this. So, you know, some of these different classifications of weapons, you kind of touched on it, but some are fast. They don't hit like a truck, but you feel like you're just like chop suey and everything, man. You know, like I'm a chef at the hibachi place,

you know. Others were like this, like a sledgehammer. Like I knew a chef at the hibachi place. Others were like a sledgehammer. I knew a sledgehammer was going to feel impactful, and sure enough, it did. And I crushed these zombies, and they kind of stagger back and stuff like that. I actually found that I enjoyed the different styles of weapons so much so that in my loadouts, my active weapons that I kept, I kept one of each type of weapon. And I never thought that it would be like that important to me.

But the fact that they just gave a fresh feeling to combat worked, like, and it worked the whole time. Sometimes I just wanted to clobber something with the baseball bat, you know? And then other times it's like, dude, I just wanted to get in the fray and just punch as fast as I could with my Wolverine claws and just, you know, start dicing everything, man. Like I found it to be really

enjoyable. I did too. I thought it was really fun. And even in the beginning, when all you have are the, the, the melee weapons, it was still fun to swap between them all because in my mind I was like, well, I have a sword. Why on earth would I use a baseball bat or like a cleaver? And in the beginning I was just rolling with like what I thought would be the best weapon during a real zombie apocalypse. And pretty soon I realized zombies don't feel any pain. I can swipe at them with a sword and they're still hitting me. And I realized that I was dying And I was like, I think I'm dying more than I'm supposed to. And I was completely disregarding the bulldozer weapons because they just seemed boring. But then I realized, oh, I can have 10 zombies. I can just do a heavy swing and it's going to knock seven of them to the ground. Okay, this is actually how I'm supposed to play. You use the different class weapons for different situations. It adds a little bit of an extra wrinkle and by the end of the game i actually liked the bulldoze weapons the most and yeah there's just a little bit of situational awareness you got to swap back and

forth i i swapped specifically towards the end of the game between two weapons one was a baseball bat that i got like a legendary baseball bat and that's a bulldozer weapon. And I put, we'll get into like how you can modify the weapons here in a minute, but I put a modification on there, but it was so great for just crowd control. Like you said, for just smashing like three or four zombies at a time, staggering them and then beating them over the head with this bat. The other one was a pair of Wolverine claws claws now these are not super super long like they're more like spiked knuckles almost um and then i had put a um like a caustic ability on those so that i was just literally melting everything but it was just in the fray just you know punching real fast and just watching parts of zombies fly and stuff too so those are my two like that i wound

up relying on the most as far as melee weapons go uh gotcha all right so i i know that you already mentioned you know that we've talked about the flesh system before but in case this is the first time someone's heard us talk about it dead island 2 is made in unreal engine 4 by the way it's beautiful it may not be a really good looking game that caught me off guard at how good this game actually looked i was not expecting that yeah it's not ue 5.1 type stuff but it's gorgeous but they have what they have designated the flesh system which is an acronym for fully locational evisceration system for humanoids i'm pretty sure they started with flesh and said we have to make this work you know i think there's no way that they came up with that guys what are the chances that it spells flesh yeah exactly uh so

anyway josh can you explain a little bit about how the flesh system works the flesh system is awesome by the way and this system never got old now there are times in the game where it was just chaotic and i'm busy just waiting through zombies zombies. There are times that it kind of takes a backseat occasionally. But dude, this is what makes slaying hundreds upon thousands of zombies entertaining for the entire time in this game. The way the Flash system works is it actually registers the type of weapon that you use and where you hit a zombie. And so if you hit a zombie with a baseball bat in its head, its head will cave in, like as if a blunt force trauma. If you hit a zombie in the arm with a katana, you're going to chop its arm off.

Yeah. And then there's a little arm bone sticking out. If you chop a zombie in the belly with a cleaver, it's intestines are coming out like this. It's, it's a, like a legit, like biologically accurate system to where it's like, if I hit something in the leg,

guess what? Zombie's going to topple over. If I use a sharp weapon, it will cut through parts of the body. If I use a blunt weapon, it will crush parts of the body. It's's it's really i i actually really enjoyed this even though they tried to make it like the forefront of at least one of the aspects of the game it wasn't always there for me but when you pay attention and you actually want to like try it it works really well and it's super gnarly. So there's like arterial spray everywhere in this game.

I wanted to ask you, Josh, is this the most graphic violence you've seen in a game? Oh, for sure. I think it probably is. And the flesh system is what makes it that way. I mean, let's be honest. We've all played first-person shooters, melee combat games.

I mean, I've seen my fair share of, you know, limbs flying off and heads flying off and stuff like that. The flesh system takes this to another level. The goofy thing is, and this is the crazy part is because of the sunny atmosphere of this game and the weird optimism of the characters and everything.

I like, I don't consider this a dark game no even though even though zombie like i can't tell you how many jaws i straight up knocked off of a zombie while i was hitting it and just watched its jaw hanging by a piece of skin or something and just giggled which sounds terrible but at the same time, it's just this really weird mix of just this sunny optimism for a game where it's just like, I wouldn't consider it dark. I wouldn't either. And even though it's incredibly graphic, I was going to say almost exactly the same thing. It's not disturbing because, first of all, they're zombies, so you don't feel bad

about hacking them to bits. They're already but it's it's so over the top it's almost a bit like old immortal combat or like the kill bill movies it's not disturbing like where you hack a guy's arm off and he's screaming it's nothing at all like that it just realistically acts like what it would be like to fight the zombies and it does like up the ante a little bit with the combat i found it to be a ton of fun and even as we start going into some of the specific mods and how those things also affect zombie bodies it's really interesting but there are layers to all the zombies you can fight your way through their clothing then the skin then the bones so it's like you you procedurally break

these zombies down. And even after you kill one, if you want, you can keep hacking away at it if you want to learn some human anatomy along the way. But yeah, it's very, very interesting. All right. Well, it's time for our first break. We're going to take a short break, and we'll be right back. Okay, Josh, continuing our conversation here around the combat of dead island 2 i think everything we talked about already sounds so cool i feel like you could just stop there and it would already be a pretty interesting game but let's talk about weapon mods which really takes things up a notch so basically you can find common uncommon epic, and legendary levels of weapons. Nothing new there. But you can

access workbenches and customize your weapons to have different effects that will impact the zombies and the environment around you. Now, some of the weapon mods are pretty ho-hum. It's just like increased physical damage. All right, that's not all that fun to talk about. There's a couple things like that, or like adding a bleed effect if you hit a zombie stuff like that what i think is really interesting are the elemental effects yes so they break down into three and this is what i did all my mods i mean all my mods i'm leaning into the elements you can have the cremator mod which is fire electrocutor which is electricity and liquidator which is caustic uh which of these do you want to talk about first josh dude we got to talk about the caustic one

first okay this is the best one this is incredible these are these are the coolest videos you can go look up on youtube or on tiktok dude i i think electricity is the first one you get right so it's like okay cool like yay. Like, yay, elemental stuff. And this game really does let you interact. Like, there's plenty of opportunity to use elements in various ways. You can almost set up like traps and stuff like that to take advantage of them. So understand that like, even though we're talking about what the weapon does to the zombies, this game really wants you to experiment a little bit with setting up large traps and things like that.

So the best of the best, in my opinion, is this caustic ability that you get. And it looks like it's poison. The game introduces you to this caustic element in a cool level. I actually kind of go into some detail with it. But ultimately, you wind up being able to put this on your weapons. Now, first of all, when we talk about modding weapons, one of the coolest things to me is the fact that the actual visuals of your weapon change. Absolutely. And I thought this was such a good touch in a game to say, listen, if I put fire on my weapon, there are now little flame jets that are pointing towards the blade and

heating up the edge of the blade, like a blowtorch, like duct tape to your cleaver or ax or whatever. Yeah. And then now the blade is just glowing red. It's, you know, electricity,

same way you got, you can see like a battery pack strapped onto the handle now with like little prongs and stuff. Like it's just really neat. And it's different for every weapon too. Like if you put, if you put if you put fire on a pitchfork like that looks different than if you put fire on your baseball bat yep you know and i thought like this is a really neat uh way that they've done this for the visuals but dude

the caustic it just it melts zombies and when i say it melts zombies, it literally melts them. You hit them enough times to put the status effect on there. 10 seconds later, their skin is melted off and it's a blobby, hideous mess, like walking at you still. The first time I used that and I saw the effect, I literally went, wait, what? And then I did it again. And I was like, this is the coolest thing I've ever seen. And now you're hitting an entire mob of zombies applying the effect. And over the course, it's very fast. It only takes a couple seconds. But you see literally the clothes melt, the skin melts, and now it's a pile of bones.

And it's so satisfying to see that happen. It's the funniest thing that I can remember seeing a game in years. The beauty of it, too, is it works on bosses and stuff, too. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's not killing a boss. Yeah, exactly. Right.

Yeah. It's not killing them, but you still see their skin melt. So now you're fighting this boss that's like this half-melted blob. He's still almost full of health, but it's like he looks like you threw acid on him yeah i'm just like dude these these effects are really really cool they do it for the fire they do it for the electricity they look different like i can tell like oh this guy's been charred from electricity or this guy's been burned by fire it's i i loved it man it really made the effects and what you were doing to these zombies stand out yeah you

get some extra crispy zombies walking around yeah so like this game the environment i mean it is a little over the top they're intentionally throwing environments that are very easy to set traps but there might be pools of water there might be cables that are attached to power but they've been cut i mean this game even dives into some stuff. You can play it co-op. When you and I first hopped in, Josh, there's one mission where you have to complete a circuit, but the cable's been cut. So all you do is you get a water jug and pour it, and then it completes the circuit. So it's like they throw stuff like that in the environment, but you can also use it to attack zombies where maybe I get the attention of this horde,

which by the way you can do with your physical voice you can yell at the zombies they start coming towards you i run past but now i just pour a bucket of water on this cut cable and as all of those all the zombies walk through it they get hit with electricity now they're taking damage over time but then you can also do things like lighting fuel on fire, which then connects to a giant barrel of oil and it's going to explode. And so it's so fun to just get a little creative. You can almost have like your little, what are they called? Rube Goldberg machines that just end up destroying these zombies. And you can have them be these pretty neat combinations where they

take electricity damage, then the oil explodes, and then you might just have to mop up a little bit of the mess. But this adds such a cool layer to the combat. I melted a zombie, the first time you get the electricity and a zombie is like shocking in a pool and then you kill him and then you look and it's like, he's a charred like electrical mess at that point, you know, like, and I know it sounds crazy cause you're like, well, how many different ways can you kill a zombie?

A lot. You'd be shocked. Yeah. Oh, great pun, Paul. And it really does matter like that's the crazy thing to me because normally like we're not cosmetic guys you know we don't care about the way my character looks and stuff like that but in a game like this where it's all

about killing zombies and how you do it and like the decisions on like i want to kill these zombies this way i want to kill these zombies this way. I want to kill these zombies that way. I want to set up this trap and see if I can't blow up this tanker truck that's next to the zombies and see if that works. That is the playground that you're given. And so it's like you get to play with all of these toys to do it that way. And it's fun. Yeah. And there's some other clever stuff like some of the zombies are firefighters turned into zombies but they're still wearing fire resistant suits so guess what you hit them with fire they're completely resistant to it so they do throw stuff like that at you as well so

you can't just roll through the whole game doing nothing but caustic damage you're gonna have certain enemies that are resistant to it um so in the beginning, you get your melee weapons, you start unlocking these mods, then you finally unlock range weapons, which can be modded with all the exact same effects. So you can have electrified bullets or caustic bullets in these different weapons. You are able to get access to pistols, shotguns, rifles, nail guns, and SMGs. Similar to melee, they also have their own categories. There are demolition weapons, which increase your toughness when you reload, tactical weapons, which boost agility and reload speed, sharpshooters, which give bonuses to headshots and limb shots, and rapid fire weapons, which trigger stackable crits and boost accuracy.

How'd you feel about the gunplay in Dead Island? I really liked having the mix. That is the best thing to me is even when I got weapons, right? So you think, hey, you're going to start off with a baseball bat and a cleaver. But once you get shotguns and rifles, you're not going back to those. Oh, yes, you are. Like, honestly, and it's not that ammo is super limited or anything it's just like the situation calls for it or i just want to get up close and personal i love the fact that there were ranged weapons i did i figured there would be but again i never played dead island one so and they give you such a plethora of melee

weapons that it was like well is this all this is gonna be and then you start getting the guns and it's like they just they were they were great honestly like i enjoyed them they were situational at times like there was obviously some fights where it's like i'm not meleeing my way through this fight i have to use a mix of like ranged weapons and stuff like that but i found them to be very satisfying um like for me i actually preferred the melee in this game but the ability to have the guns really made it even it just added another layer to the cake for me yeah the gunplay is fine it's not destiny 2 or halo gunplay uh i generally did melee if i could and i would reserve all of my ammo until i got kill them all because by the

way is there any better quest in any game other than kill them all and you get that maybe i don't know like 12 13 times over the course of this game and that just means you're getting a zombie horde and there's gonna be a lot of killing and that's why i would start busting out my range weapons yep i was the same way there was a couple times where it's like i need to pick somebody off from afar or something like that or maybe there's like a more dangerous zombie that you need to take out like the screamers for instance and it's like okay well i got to take this screamer out from a distance and stuff too but the game does a good job of making sure that you don't fall into one weapon or one style for the entire game like it does mix it up. Like you said, there are zombies that are immune to certain damages and things like that. So it's like, oh, I got to pull out a

different weapon now. Or I can't let this guy get close to me, so I have to take them out from a distance and stuff too. So I felt like they did a good job of making sure that you didn't get too routine. Yeah. They also give you throwables, which in this game they call curveballs, which is kind of a funny name. Which is really weird to me because I have no idea. You know me. I always do my keybinds in the beginning before I ever even play the game.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm like, what the heck is a curveball, man? I'm pretty sure I'm getting a baseball bat, so am I hitting baseballs at zombies now? What am I doing with this? For a game full of baseball bats and curveballs yeah there is zero actual baseball in this game yeah yeah so uh they they basically allow you to equip two curveballs at any time and it's just a different throwable that you unlock over the course of the game uh we're not going to spend a whole lot of time talking about it but were there any curveballs

in particular that you thought were kind of interesting i actually liked to cycle through them i i made myself kind of go with what I thought the game wanted to do, which was very up your combat, right? And so I would make myself change my curveballs from time to time. My favorite one was ultimately you get one where it's zombie bait, which all the zombies go to, but then it's a time bomb. So you would throw it, all of the zombies would rush over to it. And then like six seconds later, it would explode. And I just thought that was the best thing ever. Number one, it's great for crowd control when you are fighting that horde. And then number two, if you can get a

bunch of zombies together, then you can do some fun things with some of the environmental stuff and everything else too. So that to me was the best curveball. It's literally a bag that you chuck and it's full of blood and guts. And it just explodes everywhere and all the zombies run in. So it's also really fun to look at. The one that I didn't use a lot, but I thought was really interesting was the chem bomb.

So the chem bomb extinguishes flames. And sometimes- Oh, that one was handy. That was handy. Sometimes you just, instead of waiting for a fire to burn out or until timing something for flames to leave, I would just put on the chem bomb, throw it. It would extinguish flames, and then I could move forward. So I thought that was kind of neat in certain areas. There's so much more about combat.

I mean, we don't have time to cover everything. There's a card system that customizes your loadout. There are new abilities and even ultimates that you unlock over the course of the game that keeps things fresh. I felt like they did a very good job keeping the game interesting as far as pacing goes. It was almost like as soon as I started getting a little bored of melee, well, here come the guns. Okay, now I'm getting a little bored of that. Well, here comes fury mode. You know, all these things that unlock over the course of the game. I really appreciated that progression. I never felt like the game stalled. I didn't either, to be honest. And the game does a good job of throwing new zombies at

you as well, which I thought was really cool. And so there is a variety of zombies, but the game does a good job of not throwing all of them at you too soon. Now, I mean, there is a limited number of zombie types, so you are going to encounter them. But along with the weapon progression, the combat progression, the cards, I really enjoyed the fact that it's like, oh, here's a new zombie type. Oh, okay. And then you get stronger zombie types of that type sometimes as well. Oh, now you've got zombies that are immune to other things. It really just does a good job of keeping things fresh in that regard through the whole game. Totally agree. So how did you feel about the game's difficulty? I found it to be right on the money. To be honest with you,

I died a lot. I did too. And that was one of the things. To be honest with you, I died a lot. Um, and that was one, that was one of the things where I almost wondered like, am I playing wrong? Like, why does this keep happening? But it was great. The, like you said,

the kill them all. When that flashes up on screen, man, I would just, the hair on my arm would raise up and I would just smile because it's like, I am in for a great time right now. And I would die. And the,

the, the one caveat to that is, is like, you got to start all over. Like, so if you were down to the last zombie in this horde of 40 zombies and you die, it's not like the game just remembers though.

You only have one guy left to kill. Like you have to redo the whole kill them all again. And I liked that because you, I mean, everybody knows I love a good challenge. And so for me, I thought the difficulty level was spot on in that regard, because if I was dumb and I waited in too far or I overstretched, or I, I, you know, I didn't keep a wall to my back or something like

that, I would get jacked up and, you know, a big, there's big zombies that can knock you to the ground. And then now you're getting surrounded by things and stuff like that so i found it to be a very good level of difficulty for me especially since we just did the deep dive of resident evil 4 like i died 10 times more in dead island 2 than i did resident evil 4 and i was surprised at that i thought for sure dead island 2 would be a much easier game, but it wasn't. So let's talk a little bit about the open world and the loot system. And as much as we've already praised this game up to this point, in a weird way, this was kind of my favorite thing. So this game does such a neat job of giving you certain buildings or certain safes or certain doors that you can't access. And it tells you something like you need a certain type of key or you need a fire or

a police officer's swipe card or something like that. And then you have to go hunt for those items and gain access. Or it could be that there's some kind of magnetic lock, but I can look through this window and I can chuck a shuriken through the window. And if I destroy it, now the door pops open. And there's a lot of neat little mini puzzles that you can 100% ignore. You don't have to engage in any of this. But I thought it was some of the really neat stuff that filled in the open world.

It gave you a reason to look around. And honestly, because the environments in this game are really nice, the graphics are beautiful. So because the environments are really nice, there's these neat buildings, there's these little corners. I found that that little stuff is what got me to just stop slaughtering zombies and look around the world and appreciate it a little bit. And it is fun.

None of these puzzles are hard, by the way. Like you said, these are very, very simple. But it's almost like catching your breath for a second. There's zombies that are behind me, but I haven't alerted them. So as long as I don't start shooting or making a ton of noise, they don't know that I'm here. So let me figure out how to get into this guard shack because there's a treasure chest in there. And I really want to see what's in that treasure chest. And I loved that it would give you a chance to breathe and look around a little bit. And usually the rewards were worthwhile. I mean, not always, but you know, this, this is a game about loot too. So it's like, oh, I found how to get into this little guard shack, open up a treasure chest.

Oh, and I got a rare item. Oh, it's Wolverine claws. That's one of my favorite weapons. Yes. You know, or something like that, or a new with like blueprints, which allow you to add the elemental effects to your weapons and things like that. And some customization stuff as well. So I, even though they're simple in premise and most people probably wouldn't think twice about them. I really felt like this was like the little bit of crunch that they add, like on top of sushi or something. Right. Like by itself,

you'd go, I don't want that. Right. But it's like, it just, it adds that little touch that really helps to kind of accentuate everything else. The toasted breadcrumbs on top of the macaroni and cheese,

something like that. Right. Like nobody's going to be like, give me just plain breadcrumbs. That's what I want. But when you're eating the Mac and cheese and it's on there, you're like, Kyle, like these breadcrumbs that's what i want but when you're eating the mac and cheese and it's on there you're like i like these breadcrumbs man i remember the first time i saw the police station i was like i'm getting into that police station oh yeah and so

i start running around it's like all right you need a swipe card and okay well it's surrounded by cops so now i'm slaughtering all these cop zombies and i get into the first door which is the lobby but now it has a magnetic lock so I can look I can see these pipes and I chase them all down and I destroy all the power sources and now I get into the next area and then I have to find a key to the door but like all that stuff was like fun and interesting and I knew I was going to get something out of it and then finally I get into the very middle of the station and I get to loot a ton of ammo and a bunch of weapons. But even still, there's a little separate safe that is labeled with some guy's name.

I don't remember his name. It's like Officer Johnson's safe. Well, guess what? You go running down the beach. You can find Officer Johnson. He's labeled. And if you kill him and take him out, now you have the key. You go all the way back and there's a special legendary nightstick. So the fact that little puzzles like this are in the game, it also adds some replay

value. I have read that the game is very easy to platinum. So if you're looking as like a trophy hunter, I think this is one that's like a lot of fun to knock out all those little puzzles and, you know, unlock all this kind of stuff. All right, last thing until we hit our last break here. I did read a couple reviews and I watched a couple videos after playing the game, and I feel like this is sometimes when critical reviews can kind of go wrong. Because I'm seeing a lot of, like, the game was good. It's not great, but it's not bad bad and a lot of them were getting into like technical elements of the gunplay or they were saying well there's been 10 zombie games in the last four months and i think this zombie game does this little aspect better um dead island does a lot of things good

but it doesn't really excel at anything and i was like your average gamer hasn't played all 10 of those zombie games like you and I play a ton of games. The only zombie game lately we've played is Resident Evil 4. So I feel like the best question here is just, was the game fun? Did you enjoy playing it? This is the thing for me, because the reviews started coming out before the early reviews. And again, you hit the nail on the head. Everybody's like, it doesn't reinvent the genre. It just takes pieces from all these other zombie games and doesn't do any of them better and stuff like that. Dude, I'm going to say it right now. This game, I had a ton of fun playing this game. There is a reason that I beat this game in two days,

because I couldn't put it down. It was just stupid fun. And so, but at the same time, and I'm going to read a couple of reviews from the community for people that found that to be the opposite, to be honest. And so it's one of those things where it's like, everybody's entitled to their opinion and that's fine. But for me, I had a blast, like a blast playing this game, dude. And so when you talk about, yeah, but is it fun for me? It was extremely fun. I thought so too. I mean,

am I in 10 years? Am I going to still be thinking about dead Island too? No, like it's not that kind of game to stick with you, but you play it as long as it lasts. And it's immensely fun. This is like going to the movies for fast and the Furious or Top Gun or Mad Max Fury Road. It's in that vein where it's just a lot of action. It's a lot of fun. Is it the best

written game of all time? No. But man, is it worth the money for just those 20 hours that you get out of the gameplay? I thought it was a ton of of excitement a lot of fun i was worried it would become mindless i thought so too i don't think it ever really did i i will say man having not played the first one i i went into this game a little skeptical especially because of the reviews right like oh this is gonna get really repetitive man i'm just gonna wind up just getting sick of like killing all these zombies not once once, dude. Not once did I ever get tired of watching zombies melt from acid or getting electrocuted or fighting the big bruiser zombie or taking pot shots with a rifle or something like that. I don't know how they did it,

but I never got bored of that gameplay loop. Yeah, I had the exact same experience. I think if you just equip one weapon and run around with it and only switch it when you have to, maybe it would feel mindless. This is a little bit of where the game is as fun as you make it. And if you're swapping things and just having fun slaughtering zombies in different ways, it stays fresh. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. All right, well, let's go ahead and take a short break and we'll be right back to finish the

show out with our regular segments. Okay, Josh, time for everyone's favorite segment. Let's do some hot takes. Yes. Oh boy. All right.

For me on this one, this is, I'm going'm going to this is I'm trying to get spicy. I'm going to keep it this way. This game has a card system and I like card systems. And the card system is basically a skill tree. And you get survival skills like combat skills, some other. We won't spoil what some of the later skills are because that is a little bit spoilery and stuff like that my hot take is tech trees or card based systems for skills and stuff like that even if they suck to me it still adds something to the game i don't know if it's just like i took the bait because this card system

really doesn't affect the combat in the game that much. The weapons do, the elemental effects do, all of that stuff is fine. I found the card system in this game to be honestly completely pointless. I felt like it did not change the gameplay all that much at all, in my opinion. And yet, with that being said, I'm still a sucker because every time I got a new card, I was like, ooh, yeah, some news happening. And so it's like, I will say straight up that I think the card system in this game sucks. And yet, just for the simple fact that it had it, I was still happy. That's very funny because I would often ignore the cards and I'd be like,

okay, I've played about two hours. Maybe I should check these out because the game would constantly say you have an open slot for Slayer. And I'm like, yeah, I don't really care. And then eventually I was like,

all right, there's a break in action. Maybe I should check my card deck. And then all the cards are like shrouded. And then when you mouse over, it shows you. So that way, you know,

which ones are new. I would have like five or six cards sometimes. And I mouse over them i'm like yeah i don't care about all of these but i guess that one might be okay so i'll equip it so the cards they don't like you said they don't change very much but it's still fun to read through them and just make little modifications they're not they're not gonna make or your build, but it's still neat to read through. I feel like I was hoodwinked because it's like, this doesn't matter. None of these cards are really affecting anything in the game, but I still was like, it's got a tech tree, Paul. I love it. I love tech trees, man. If you block multiple zombie hits, you get a stackable increase to

toughness. It's like, great. I don't care. I'm't care it's in a row without taking one man yeah just let me swing the bat that's all i need all right my hot take for this is all right now don't hear what i'm not saying i'm not saying this game is better than resident evil 4 but i will say this was the most fun that i've had killing zombies since dead Rising 2. Like, Dead Rising just had that stupid fun of, I'm going to connect a car battery to a wheelchair, and now I have a mobile electric chair, and I can push it into a zombie, and they get electrocuted in it. Or like, the drill bucket. Like, that game had such ridiculous crafting that, you know me, that's like my play style 100%. This is the most fun that I've had killing zombies since then. And that game's, I don't know, like 16 years old or something.

This to me, I was shocked. I was the one who pushed for Dead Island 2 as a deep dive. And even I assumed this game would not be very good. And I was worried with it coming out in the middle of all these big name AAA titles, especially this summer. And I feel like it just kind of held its own. It was just a lot of fun. Dude, my hot take could easily be this is the most fun I've had in a video game in a while. Like legitimately. At least since Hogwarts Legacy.

You know, like, I mean, yeah, it's not the same type of game, you know what I mean? But I just had a blast. And I'm trying to think of another game where I'm just sitting there giggling, like smiling, having fun, you know, just mindless. I don't have to concentrate necessarily. I can if I want to, if I want to practice builds or whatever and all that stuff. But it was like, it was just a really entertaining, mindless fun for me. Yeah. And I hope that's what a lot of people experience when

they play it. All right. So that shares a few of our thoughts. Josh, you got some community reviews. I do. I had to go to Metacritic for this because this game is Epic exclusive. And Epic doesn't really do user reviews. They give a score, but it's just terrible to try to find actual written reviews and stuff on this. So I went to Metacritic and I just, I pulled the gamut. I have four reviews, um, from, from terrible to great. So the first one, let's start off in the middle at a six. Uh, and this person says this game is average in just about every way. Just like the first game, there really is no progression system. Everything scales to your level, including the items that you pick up. Items have no uniqueness and are replaced quickly. Side quests are only really worth doing for the curve ball unlocks I mean, I hear what they're saying. And if you want to poke a game for having where everything scales to your level, I completely understand that criticism.

But if the alternative is forcing me to grind to get to the next area, I want no part of it. Right. Yep. Yep. I agree completely. The reason I picked this one is, again, this is a person that found everything to just be mediocre about this game. And so because nothing stood out to them, they kind of went, eh. And that is one of the overarching sentiments. It's just like, well, it becomes mindless. It becomes repetitive. And it's kind of like, yeah, but I don't know that you're playing it the right way either.

Are you just using the same pistol for the whole game? Right, right. You know? Okay you're playing it the right way either. Are you just using the same pistol for the whole game? Right, right. You know? Okay, so this next one is an eight, and it says, It's worth mentioning that somehow, after a radically challenging development cycle, that the game came out as polished as it did. It runs exceptionally well on PC, too. Was the wait worth it? Sure, if you actually liked the first one.

This game doesn't do anything perfectly or reinvent the wheel, but it was a blast to play. Isn't that why we play games? Wow. That's kind of like exactly the point I was trying to make about critics dogging on this game a little bit. That's what it boils down to. It's a fun game. But here's literally the six was a guy that said that it doesn't do anything new. The eight is a guy that says it doesn't do anything new, but it's fun. We all agree on that all right this next one is a two the game is really bad they mix horror and beat-em-ups uh all making it bad in both genres the looting system is really poor every weapon is the same

and rarity is basically just the weapon level making it useless the story is okay the graphics are okay but it's not worth the price nine different zombies every boss is just a normal monster afterwards making it just as repetitive you die from flames and electricities more than zombies and the key holders well since the looting system is bad you just don't want to go and find them and farm them and since that is about three quarters of the game time the game is only 15 hours in the end someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed that's a little bit of a cranky take if you ask me i i mean dude i like i didn't go hunt down all the key holders no you know i was just having fun with the game i didn't want to get that sidetracked and go spend 30 minutes trying to find a key to open a chest kind

of thing um yeah i don't this i don't get that one like it's there if you want it, I don't, this is, I don't get that one. Like it's there if you want it, but you don't have to do it. And it doesn't something you'd complain about. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. All right. And then this last one, this person gave it a 10 and they say, yes, this game was worth waiting almost 10 years for graphics are beautiful. The gore is one of the best I've seen in a zombie game. The physical damage of each weapon is different. I've never seen a game with such perfect internal organs surpassing even mortal combat the city is very faithful to reality the story's a little weak but the real fun of the game is the exploration and to kill zombies in every possible way with thousands of weapons in the game and with their unique damage types it's the best zombie game for me oh wait the best zombie game for me. Oh, wait. The best zombie game for me was Dying Light,

but now it's Dead Island 2. This game is zombie killing and stress relief playground, so I give it a 1,000 out of 10. That did remind me of one thing. I think if you have watched more zombie movies and you're more aware of the history of the genre, you will enjoy it more because there's a lot of meta humor. There's an entire character where his entire story arc is about how we have to strive to be like the characters in the movies, and it's who we strive to be. There's a little bit of meta humor to all of it. If you're missing that, I think the game's going to fall much more flat. But I actually found those parts to be very funny and very interesting. And I think you're more that i think the game's gonna fall much more flat but i actually found those parts to be very funny and very interesting and i think you're more likely to give that kind of positive

review if you kind of understand what they were shooting for yeah yeah this game is not taking itself seriously this is not coming at you like guys the world is in danger and one person must save us all yeah this is more like arnold schwarzenegger commando like you're gonna get the one-liners and over the top action yeah it's a lot of attitude so now that's what some of the reviews were again we're gonna have to switch to metacritic on this which uh does use a zero to 100 scale. Yeah, it just gets goofy. But then it's like sometimes you dive in and am I thinking OpenCritic too where it's like a 7.5 or something?

Yeah, Metacritic is a 0.0 to 10.0. To 10.0, there you go. And they're cranky on Metacritic. It's rare to have anything above an 8. Okay, and then just for clarification because I am fair in this game, cranky on Metacritic. It's rare to have anything above an eight. So... Okay. And then just for clarification, because I am fair in this game, what I did, because Metacritic divides it into PlayStation, Xbox, and PC. And so what I did is I went to all three of them, added them up, and then divided by three to give us the average of each platform.

So on a scale of zero to 10 with decimals, what's your guess on where this game fell? Oh, man. The game's only been out a few days, so I feel like you're going to get more complainers than people who love it. I'm going to say 6.5. 6.5. Well. I suck at Metacritic scoring. And I thought this game is fun. I had a lot of fun playing this game. But I also get that a lot of people are probably going to be like, oh, it's repetitive. So I guessed 7.4 was my guess. And then when I averaged it all out, the average comes out to 7.3 paul wow yeah i'm impressed is what's

funny is on consoles it got like an 8.0 on ps5 and xbox pc is what brought it down yeah pc i mean we're pc gamers apparently we're a hard bunch to please sometimes because we're not uppity like all the pc master race people i don't know. Maybe not. So yeah, 7. I almost nailed it, man. I was so proud. That's good. I'm really surprised. I was a little worried you're going to say like a 5.1 or something like that.

But I think that's a fair rating. I think on Metacritica, 7.3 is perfectly fair. I think so too. Yeah, that seems to be right on the money for me. Josh, a winner is you. Oh, boy, I haven't done this in a while, and I was not prepared for this at all. So, oh, boy, here we go, Paul. Play that music.

Hey, Danny, you want to go to the Blue Crab Diner and have some dinner with me and the boys? I don't know. That was bad. I'm not good at this, man. It's a little vanilla. I've been married too long, man. I don't know. That was bad. I'm not kidding. It's a little vanilla. I've been married too long, man. I don't know pickup lines anymore. That line was so vanilla,

Michael's eating it up right now. Oh, yeah. He'd appreciate that one. Okay, so this is where we're actually going to rate the game the way that we do. We rate games based on a make love, marry, murder scale.

Murder is don't play this game. It's not worth your money. It's not worth your time. I didn't enjoy it. Make love means this is a fun game. We recommend it. It's not for everybody. And you're not going to be thinking about this game two years from now,

but it's worth your time. And then marry is this is a must play game. You got to play it. It just stands out for so many different reasons, or it's such an incredible value for the money that you owe it to yourself to check these out. This one for me is a very, very easy make love. I had such a good time playing this game.

I blew through it because I didn't want to put it down. I was having so much fun that I just wanted to keep playing. The guy that said this was like stress relief for him, I felt like was right on the money because we cover so many games and we have to sometimes remember the plot. We have to remember the characters and we got to remember all these little aspects and all that stuff. This game, dude, I got to just slay zombies any way I wanted to in the most gory, horrific, like awesome fashion. I never found it to get stale. I never found it to get repetitive.

I thought the level design was really cool. The characters were memorable. It was well voice acted. It was gorgeous in play. It wasn't buggy. I mean, it just hit on so many cylinders for me. It is a short game. I mean, I blew through this game in two days. Now, one of those days was a marathon session, but I had 15 hours in this

game to beat it. And I actually did do some of the side quests as well. So I didn't just beeline the main campaign. If it was a little bit longer, I would say this is a Mary easy, but just based on the shortness of the game and the fact that I do think some people will find it repetitive and that's not a knock against them. Like, you know, I get that take, but man,

was this just fun for me? Yeah. Easy. Make love for me, man. You basically took all the words out of my mouth. I mean, I'm going to give it a make love as well.

That's not to say that it's not immense fun the fun level operates at a nine or a ten out of ten pretty much the whole time in a weird way it's almost a little like broforce in that sense where we talked about it being a lot of fun and very pulpy and over the top action but it's just such a short game how do you possibly give it a merry rating right and since this one is relatively short i don't think it's just such a short game. How do you possibly give it a Mary rating? And since this one is relatively short, I don't think it's like you have to get your hands on it right away. If you're a frugal gamer, just wait till it's on sale. There's zero reason to rush out and pay full price for it. This summer is chock full of games. Like if you haven't played Hogwarts Legacy or Meet Your Maker, or if you just want to wait around

for Redfall or Tears of the Kingdom, all these games are coming out within a couple weeks of each other. I don't think you have to rush out and buy it. If you are really jonesing for something before Zelda and you have the money, sure, go pick it up. But this game is not nearly as good as Resident Evil 4, where I would say, go buy Resident Evil 4 now. This game is just a little bit different. It's immensely fun, but I don't put it in that all-time top game status. Right, yeah. It's not a must-play, but if you really want something fun and different and mindless, that, to me, is where this fits the bill perfectly.

Legitimately, Tears of the Kingdom comes out when this airs, I mean, two weeks, right? Or less than two weeks. You can beat this game in less than two weeks. And if you want that palate cleanser of like, man, I just want something fun to play before I get into this epic RPG that Tears of the Kingdom is going to be, this is a perfect game in that regard. Yeah, totally agree. All right. Well, Josh, we have just one last segment. Let's go to our leaderboard and see where this game stacks up.

All right. So we have an overall leaderboard where every time we finish a deep dive, we have to agree as a consensus, where are we going to rank this game against every other game that we have deep dived? We now have a total of 94 games. This is going to make number 95. And coming in near the top, we've got some stuff like God of war 2018 rust valheim satisfactory

toward the middle of the crowd we got some stuff like dungeon defenders uh near automata evil west bro force a little bit lower than that we have the likes of death loop wasteland 3 tiny tino's wonderlands first spoken um things of that nature so with both of us having a ton of fun but also recognizing the value of the game uh when i look at like our top 23 24 games i don't think i'm seeing it that high personally i'm not either i actually looked at that area but we're we're in the likes of like terraria outer wild Wilds, Risk of Rain 2, No Man's Sky. I do feel like it's a little bit lower than that. I agree.

I dropped down to Dungeon Defenders because that was a game where I was like, man, that was just another game where it was just fun. There's nothing crazy about it, but I had a really good time playing that. But then the problem is we get into games like like there's games like near automata and resident evil village and deep rock galactic and i'm like oh those games were all pretty darn good too i also agree yeah so then it's like so then i but you mentioned broforce right and broforce in a way is similar in the fact that it's just over the top it's a lot of fun it's not trying to reinvent anything it's not trying to reinvent anything. It's not trying to do anything Oscar worthy, you know, or change up a genre. And that to me is where it was

like, I could see putting it like right at like 40, you know, or in that range. Part of me wants to put a higher, but there's just, there's too many good games higher than that, I think. Although I probably could be persuaded to. Yeah. When I look at the list, I feel like the closest comp for me is Evil West. And I know you didn't like it as much as I did, but it's just a short game with really inventive combat. I would put this over Evil West, to be honest. I had so much more fun with Dead Island than Evil West that that is not hard for me at all. I was going to say, I think we need to put it below Destiny 2, Nier Automata, Resident Evil Village, and Deep Rock Galactic. But I would put it above Evil West.

Pillars of Eternity 2. Sorry, shots fired. I know people really love that game. It's just a lot to take in. You're either going to love Pillars of Eternity because you're in the mood for that insanely epic RPG or not. Yeah. For me, it's just a little too much to handle. Yeah.

So for me personally, that's where I would have it. Let's do it. I'd have it between Deep Rock Galactic and Evil West. Oh, fine. I think that's a great landing spot, to be honest. I'd have a hard time putting it up, like I said, near Hollow Knight or above Destiny 2 or games like that. But I'd play this 10 out of 10 times over Evil West. Okay, so we'll lock that one in. Number 37. I think that's a very fair rating. I did play co-op a little bit until I left you in the dust because I had an entire day to do nothing but play dead Island too.

But yeah, I mean the co-ops a blast too, and it worked flawlessly for us. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Well,

that wraps up our deep dive on dead Island too. Please remember to go check out multiplayer squad.com to sign up on Patreon and also come hit us up on socials everywhere at multiplayer pod. We do release episodes every Monday, Thursday, Saturday, make sure to hit the follow button. So you don't forget to check out our next episode. And the next deep dive is going to be star Wars Jedi survivor, which I think is going to be in three weeks.

Cause we'll have two bonus rounds before then, but with the breakneck pace we have been playing games who knows take all that with a grain of salt whenever we finish jedi survivor we'll have that deep dive ready um also a little birdie told me that we uh may or may not have a guest host for that one uh we that birdie told me we are having a guest yeah so we'll have to see might be a first time guest so stick around for that one so thank you to all of our listeners thanks for sticking around are having a guest. Yeah. So we'll have to see. Might be a first time guest. So stick around for that one. So thank you to all of our listeners.

Thanks for sticking around for the whole episode. And until next time, happy gaming. All right. See everybody.