Waiting for other players...

Combat became boring, level design more unnecessarily complicated. And the writing is so bad that no words can even describe the size of the brain cancer that this game gives you. Every character you encounter look like their brain was removed from them. Everyone is stupid but not even in a funny way. Quest lines are constantly like: go 30 meters to talk, then 30 meters to talk, then 30 meters to talk... And it can even be only one character that you are talking to. Why? Because developers wanted to lengthen the playtime I guess. I can't recommend this slop.

Pretty much everything in this review is subjective. I recommend buying the game, I enjoyed it and found it to be worth my money. This, despite being a positive review, will only go over the downsides.

According to many, many negative reviews, this game is riddled with bugs. Somehow I encountered absolutely zero bugs during my 50 hour playthrough. Is it just luck? Probably. Honestly, the game ran flawlessly for me.

I thought the story was alright. It wasn't captivating, but it sufficed for the type of game this is. The story isn't on par with the first game. but it was pretty good. I'm not going to summarize the story or get into what I think makes it good, because that is different for everyone.

The combat was sort of inverted from the first game. Combat against humans felt more refined and natural, whereas combat with infected (mainly biters, virals, and volatiles) was sloppy and boring. The volatiles are far less scary than the first game. They are sluggish and can hardly keep up with you if you play your cards right. The paraglider allows you to subvert the night chases. The volatiles are tanky and high damaging, but not in a challenging way. It's just annoying you can't block heavier attacks without the carnage manica, a DLC item, and even then it does nothing. Another thing, demolishers and goons are sandbags. They rarely hit you if you play well, but they still take a significant amount of hits to kill.

Personally, I enjoyed the crafting system in this game, save for the upgrading. The upgrading hardly came into play for most recipes. I only upgraded medicine, throwing knives, and the UV flares (which I almost never used) because everything else was useless or not worth the hassle.

There is a lot of grind in his game, none of it is required, but it makes life easier. Obviously, increasing stamina and health levels are the main thing, but for me, grinding for better weapons was terrible. Instead of going out and exploring, I would upgrade blueprints and use those. Yes, I know that's intended, but not to the magnitude that it was for me. Fighting for weapons seemed useless, they would come at half durability and often be lower damaging than what was helpful to me. Looting for weapons sucked, they'd be in chests hidden away in dark zones, which was a nightmare to loot early game. By the end game, I had no need for new weapons. I could see the ending from miles away.

The dialogue on NPCs was strange. Many conversations shifted gears so many times that I almost got whiplash. The timing on many of the voicelines was noticeably off, which people speaking either too close to the end of Aiden's sentence or too far from it. Much of the dialogue was flat, only enough to get the point across. There was no depth or emotion to much of what happened. At multiple quiet/sad parts in the game the characters would stop being sad and say something like, "Anyway..." or, "Let's get going." Sometimes the dialogue and subtitles from radio calls would overlap with cutscenes, making it nearly impossible to understand what was happening.

The ragdolls were funny, though.