The quests and everything else are the same basic 'go here, fetch this, kill that' stuff you'll have seen anywhere else. There is very little, if anything truly new from a gameplay perspective aside from a new island to explore and characters to interact with.

From a gameplay perspective, this is basically just more Dead Island, to the point where I expect that this was originally a DLC campaign promoted and expanded to the level of a mini-sequel. My best guesses are that between importing a character that was already quite well levelled up and thus had a lot of their more enjoyable skills on hand, and with the core gameplay and its shortcomings understood, the more enjoyable elements were then able to stand out a bit more. After putting 22+ hours into this game I walked away thinking it was much shorter than the previous game but after checking the time spent in both they were nearly identical, and I really can't explain why one felt longer than the other. 22h 36m PlayedHard to really explain but I enjoyed this game somewhat more than I did the original Dead Island.

Dead island 2 import character