Dead Island 2

10/10 would zombie again and again and again. Although the the original Dead Island games had such great combat and locations, I found it hard to recommend when it came to the singleplayer mode. My main issues with those games were that progression felt like such a slog (even when importing saves from 1 to Riptide, surprisingly), and there were multiple points where I felt like I was fighting with the game to finish most of the quests due to how clunky just moving your character around the world felt... on top of most of the other jank featured in the Definitive Edition "upgrades". It was to the point where the first thing I even attempted to pull off in this game, was to climb a car to check whether or not the developers even put an ounce of attention toward making the game good. Not only did my first jump make it over the hood of the car, the game had a special mantle animation play because the jump was just shy of clearing the entire thing. This single mantling/climbing mechanic alone fixes about 80% of all the issues I had struggled with from the originals, and the combat was given some WD-40 and a ludicrous amount of refining on systems that had already felt completely solid as they were. On top of this, the developers went insane and somehow managed to do something incredible: Dead Island 2's balancing and progression, EVEN during postgame, makes it one of the most perfectly paced games I have ever played. With every twist and turn it always felt like there was more to uncover, just one more thing right around the corner where most other games would have already finished their end credits.. and I NEVER felt like I had hit a brick wall that only some serious grinding could fix. It is absolutely amazing to see this series come back with such a bang- even the story was made with so much effort and care to where I found myself actively hunting down and reading the journals scattered around the world just to piece together more of the puzzle of what happened to everyone.