I was so disappointed by the micro stutters of Hogwarts Legacy and Dead Island 2, that I kept complaining about Unreal Engine 5.

Today I remembered that both are running on custom Unreal Engine 4. They don't have Nanite or Lumen. They are the worst performing Unreal games by far where even 100 FPS feels like 35 very often. And non of their issues are related to modern Unreal features.

#UnrealEngine@GameDEV

So, I finished Dead Island 2 (both the main game, Haus DLC, and most of the SOLA, but left it for later). It's a memorable game, not a circus, as many were saying — it has humor and dorky moments, but most of it is indeed about drama and survival.

There were no bugs during my playtime, just very uneven performance on fast mouse movement. And in this game fast mouse movement IS 90% of the game. And then you have co-op — generally nice, but with 2 people you have a bit of network lag and with 3 people it turns into a teleportation show.

The main concept is from "that era" with no open world and instead you have linked hubs, each with their respective quests and features. So eventually it will be very noticeable that you've been there already for the third time during the sidequest. Youngblood was very similar in this regard, but it got annoying in like a 3 hours.

Get only the Ultimate Edition and only on sale (which ends up in 22 hours). DLCs are amazing and add up a lot to the main game.