This games existence is very strange to me, indeed. I'm unashamedly a fan of the first game, to the extend I'd call it an underrated classic. A game which, even at the time of release, I was the only person I knew in my entire friend group of games who even played it. Now, more than a decade later, the sequel appears. Years of development hell and to be honest, this game is lucky to even see the light of day, let alone be as... um, decent (?) as it is. Dead Island 2 has one and only one thing genuinely impressive about it, and that is its buckets and buckets of viscera and gore. You can go absolutely primal on mother fuckers, pick them apart with weapons that generate realistic looking flesh rending and mutilating depending on what weapon is used and where you strike them. The amount of hours that must have been put into making this work are absolutely commendable. Everything surrounding that, however, is just dull and uninteresting. Not even in a bad way, by all means, but everything seems so formulaic it borders on being white noise to accompany the sick and violent ways you'll pull apart the human (zombie) body over and over and over again. The game absolutely plays like a game that went from studio to studio, as the story and several of the gameplay elements seem very disjointed from one another, to the extent where the 'rage mode' available at the beginning of Dead Island 1 and Riptide is now pulled out and reintroduced about 50 percent of the way through the game for no reason other than to introduce a rather uninteresting and fairly lame story development. The existence of such a wide cast of characters does seem to encourage multiple playthroughs, but as there don't really exist any meaningful role playing opportunities, I don't really find myself drawn to doing another playthrough any time soon. Maybe in a few years I'll find myself nostalgic for it in the same way I feel for it's predecessor, but I will admit I highly doubt it. A very commendable effort by it's development team and well worth a playthrough if you're a sick bastard that likes me and enjoy blood and gore a little too much.