23rd November
Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we’ve been playing over the past few days. This week we explore a game that’s also a music album, we struggle to be okay with the ultra violence in a supposedly silly zombie splatfest, and we engage in the age-old video game pastime of grinding.
Catch up with the older editions of this column in our What We’ve Been Playing archive.
Dead Island 2, PS5 Pro
Dead Island 2 is grim. It’s an over-the-top tongue-in-cheek depiction of a zombie apocalypse, but it’s still grim. I know some people will say that this mixture of slightly absurdist parody and brutal violence makes it easier to swallow, but I think I’m on the opposite end of that thought. If anything, the bright colours, silly characters, and amusing boss encounters make the moments of terror all the more startling. The gaudy nature of the game made me drop my guard, but then a walking corpse with half its face missing, lunging out of an on-suite bathroom, almost made me add a dollop of brown to the vibrant colour scheme.