Dead Island 2 is something of a cross-platform success story, offering reasonable image quality and performance across both last-gen and current-gen consoles - so how does it fare on PC? Does it buck the trend of recent Unreal Engine 4 releases by delivering a stable, performant experience, or is it another disappointing PC port in the 2023 #StutterStruggle saga?
To find out, I played through around the first half of the single-player game on a range of PC hardware to nail down optimised settings and run performance tests.
Before we get to the results, let's start with that first boot experience - which is broadly positive. The initial logo screens can be skipped with the enter key, but you'll want to make sure you don't skip the (rapid) shader compilation step. It's easily done, but this pre-compiling shaders ahead of gameplay is key in ensuring a smoother, more consistent PC gaming experience. For those wondering, consoles are fixed hardware platforms, so shaders are shipped with the code.