After Haus and it’s latex-ridden cult of severed heads, Dead Island 2 returns with the second DLC, SoLA Festival. Is this worth the ticket price, or are the fans going to be disappointed by the concert beats? As long as you’re not expecting anything remarkably different from what the main game offers, you may be in for a bloody good time, emphasis on blood.

Beat to the Beat

The SoLA Festival area can be accessed after completing the main story quest The Giant Slayer. Going in around that player level isn’t recommended however, unless you bring a few friends along for cooperative play, as this expansion will put you into some challenging and often annoying boss fights. Some battles will drag along for several minutes, and dying means you have to do it all over again – and you will die a lot –, a punch in the gut that kills part of the sense of progression and enjoyment of this festival. With a playtime of around four hours, it’s not without its walls and repetitive moments.

But Dead Island 2 was never about brains, unless we mean the splattered ones. It’s a fun game with a fantastic melee combat system that throws some simple fetch quests for good measure, but if you own the original, you know what you are getting into with SoLA Festival. Only this time, it’s more one-note than ever, making Haus even seem extremely diverse by comparison.

SoLA Festival is about bloody beats, concert stages, pool areas, and lots of zombies. More often than not, there are some smaller areas or hubs to complete before you can unlock the next one, and you’re going to the stage to turn up the beat and draw the attention of waves of zombies. There are a few new zombified faces, along with a couple of new weapons: the Ripper is a mix of baseball bat and circular saw, and the Sawblade Launcher is a ranged tool of decapitation.

Clearly, it’s not huge in content, but it’s still fun in a familiar way. The areas are vibrant and always worth exploring right up to the last corner, and if you decide to take a breath and look around, you can see that this looks like a fantastic place for a festival, minus the corpses all over the place. A few set-pieces are entertaining, such as the wind turbine to which you feed zombies, but others are more on the bothersome and repetitive side, the orgone ball from the mood speakers being the highlight for all the negative reasons.

The Same Old Tunes

This SoLA Festival DLC isn’t going to change anything about your love for Dead Island 2. It’s more of the same in a different setting, it looks great as always, and combat remains exciting, pulpy, and crunchy. The lore is disposable, although you’ll meet a new face and a familiar persona that I’m going to keep undisclosed as to avoid spoilers, but the bulk of this content expansion is the action – run, crush, repeat, a loop that is as predictable as it is satisfying.

Score: 7/10

Pros:

• More of the same Dead Island 2 gameplay
• The festival setting is beautiful to explore
• Over four hours of playtime for a DLC

Cons:

• Not too rich in content
• Boss fights can drag for long
• Some set-pieces are fun, others are boring

Dead Island 2 SoLA Festival review code was provided by the publisher. You can read MP1st’s review and scoring policy right here.