//HUGE SPOILERS//
My husband and I got this game together after beating the first one. Preface, we were disappointed with the first one's ending too. Then we played the DLC, which was mid. Transitioning into this second game, I consider it the most disappointing, and quite a let down in contrast to the first one in really every way.
The characters were mostly unlikeable and very gaslighty for all your fetch quests which makes up the bulk of the game - I really dislike games where you're just getting stupid stuff done for useless people but then in cutscenes they're saving you somehow. Someone's always saying 'hurry up, aiden!' and doing literally nothing, and it's so redundant it became in inside joke.
I didn't feel inclined to help the rebels, or the peace keepers, but ultimately chose the latter just out of curiosity. The game leans towards the rebels are the 'moral' option, but Sophie literally just sends her people to the slaughter and then blames everyone else -- there's even a part where she comically lists everyone thats died for her, while she sits safely on the inside yelling orders that gets people killed, while she's doing nothing. The peace keepers aren't that great either, but at least they were kinda interesting and not wrapped up in the 'my dead parents life goal is my whole personality, we're just angsty orphans' trope.
The character development for the majority of them is very poor, and both the npcs and aiden are extremely contradictive, to the point where aidens responses and decisions (beyond the few you can make, that hardly matter) are almost always out of character. In the fights that matter, hes usually losing, which makes no sense given the point you're at in the game level and weapon wise.
Lawan was also an extremely annoying 'romantic interest' that you're just kinda stuck with the whole game - her quests are largely just stupid for an apocalyptic setting, like "go get my shoes im mad at you". You spend so much time flying around the map apologizing for every little thing that upsets her, while she tells you you're stupid but she loves you, and don't 'mother hen' her while she does that exact thing to you all the time. Oh and also, my favorite, "hurry up, aiden!" I keep thinking, is this a zombie game or a low quality romance simulator with some zombies in the background??
and where tf did jack go at the end like he just ran away from a missile and disappeared, I didn't get an option to hunt him down or kill him there. ppl just teeheeing away all the time like.
the ending glitched out for me, so after mia dies i got end credits and then the screen went black and kicked me out of the game. :) from a buggy perspective, this game is SO buggy, in one session (with great internet connection and fairly powerful computers) we had to close the game and relaunch, over and over. Which sometimes was to our benefit, because we'd be able to skip an annoying part of a quest and be teleported to where we needed to be. Othertimes, you're losing loot because the zombies you killed are non interactive, your jumping all around the map unable to interact with anything, stuck on a random staircase, oh and my FAVORITE is when you're doing the incredibly unfun and redundant generator quests, and your coop member falls through the elevator and dies, meanwhile for the host is trying to get through the ever resetting elevator doors that keep opening and closing. When playing coop, the interface also gets confused if you play with someone further ahead than you, and marks areas as completed because they did it in their run through but you did not in yours.
I cannot recommend this game, personally, because it felt like that movie theater moment where you go 'wait thats it? its over?" and if you're wondering -- "well gee spicy you couldnt hate it that much you have 68 hours" - most of that was spent reloading due to glitches, screaming at my monitor while i try to use the stupid paraglider to get to the top of another generic building, or doing one of the very few fun things in the game imo which is hunting down "backpack guys" while being chased by volatiles and trying to get good free weapons (because the bounties were kind of annoying as you can only track 2 at a time and have to keep running back to the same place, submitting, and then get 2 more).
Would not play again, but if you have a friend that you want to get into silly situations with, this could be, at the least, entertaining for the 30 hours or so of gameplay that's really there. The zombie chase at night will always be fun, would be even more fun if they dropped better loot...
