How to Survive 2: What a Crap Game

[Part of the Diary of Zombies]

To try progress a bit I decided to solo the herding of a few zombies for Kovac (which lags out in coop), as well as collecting some copper pulleys for bow upgrades all around. With Jim and DL we then try help Leslie destroy one of Kovac's zombie holding facilities but the game simply cannot handle the number of zeds being thrown our way now as we suffer disconnect upon disconnect. Thinking we can advance in a different manner, we attempt the Pylon-40 attack (#6), and not far in both Jim and I get disconnected, again due to having too many zombies, leaving DL the lone camp defender!

He somehow manages to win the battle at the cost of three traps on the East entrance and pretty much everything on the Western main entry. Once we reconnect we help him clean up the stragglers and rebuild the defenses but it's become clear this is as far as the game will let us play in multiplayer which reeks of bad design.

Going solo, I still manage to complete Leslie's task of destroying Kovac's zombie supply then getting vaccines for her, gaining a pet coyote for Madison, and learning Kovac has some sort of dead alien in the bunker basement - all because there are only a third of the zombies now. Unfortunately this now leaves me in another "leveling grind gap" which when played solo is really boring. With that, we bid this place farewell. It's a shame really, and I suppose it's now up to Kenji, Leslie, Madison and her coyote to fight against Kovac and his goons.

Stomping on a sewer croc while Madison kills zombies.

As it stands though, I can't recommend How to Survive 2 to anyone. Reports from DL and Jim indicate that How to Survive 1 (the first game) also suffered terrible connectivity/coop issues, so I say simply find a better zombie game that doesn't waste your time.

Insight: Egg launcher acid can kill gators even when they are submerged.

How to Survive 2: Difficulty Up

[Part of the Diary of Zombies]

It seems like Kovac's goons are up to more than just thievery, as we investigate the "death" of Kenji's ally Leslie. While we do find proof that the goons were after her, the woman herself is alright having lost her tail by providing a headless corpse as her double. Of course we had to first gain her trust by running trial missions at the nearby army base which is full of armored zeds! Their bullet proofing means the fastest way to clean them out is via head shot archery, but their numbers and resilience really make the lag and disconnects unbearable, especially in one where we need to find and drag four supply crates around the map too.

Fortunately Jim volunteers to solo it while DL and I go on resource runs. This lets us continue, and are soon escorting Leslie to one of Kovac's towers where she plans to hijack the signal. After fighting the waves of zombies, she seems to forget why she was there so to salvage the mission we literally kick her into the spot she needs to go to. Her hack fails, but she still rewards us with a decent supply run location afterwards.

Kick it until it works!

This also reunites us with the child, Super Madison, who has made her base in the sewers. We help her with some expansion projects via killing the zombies and zombie gators down there while also upgrading our own base which is now level 40. The volatiles come in groups of 12 now, and on the last attack (#5) we actually lost 9 or so of the main side traps due to the sea of fatties that attacked. It looks like we're going to need to upgrade our equipment a bit to handle what comes next!

Insight: Some missions just have shit design (worse than others) when it comes to connectivity. Instead of getting frustrated, just let one of your team solo the damn thing and be done with it.

How to Survive 2: Base Expansion

[Part of the Diary of Zombies]

DL was not pleased with our prior watch tower loss and has since been working solo to expand the camp and occupy the entire plateau (with storage chests) so that the zombies stop spawning nearby and being more heavy handed with wall side traps for those that do. For the most part, this seems to have worked. I also ran a solo mission - to help farmer Raymond shepherd some zombie pigs into a barn.

Trying to do this as a team was impossible due to the lag, but I managed the task solo to unlock the rest of his other voodoo related, lag-filled quests which we manage to plow through, the culmination of which is the killing of the same zombie pigs. Really Raymond? That guy is an ever bigger loser than Kovac, whom we learn is using his fans and the trappers to steal from the other nearby survivors (like Raymond).

He also setup some evil Easter Egg hunt which lured a little girl "Super" Madison into trouble. Needless to say we save the kid, and collect many chocolates along the way. Most interesting is the Egg-Launcher reward she gives us for doing so... as Jim quickly finds out it really is an acid grenade launcher! Combined with bait that lures all nearby zeds into a tight congregation, this makes for a great weapon.

These zombies seem to be expanding in size too!

Insight: Egg-splosions go through some fences and gates.