An enjoyable experience with too much grind – Earn to Die 2 Review

In general this game gets a lot right. It’s just enjoyable and fun to bust through the levels at breakneck speed crashing through piles of boxes and bodies. That loop is pretty fun. And at first the story mode is pretty fun with going a short way and amassing money with multiple runs to upgrade your car until you can finally make the checkpoints and eventually conquer a level. The main downfall of this game shows up after the first level. After spending a dozen runs to beef up your starting car and finally making it to the end of the level all progress you just made is thrown out so you can start with a brand new car with no upgrades. You can’t use that older car anymore even though it would be way better to use since it has all the upgrades. Instead it’s all thrown in the trash and you have to do it again on the second level. And the third. And the fourth. And on and on and on. Eventually you will realize you’ve done hundreds of runs of basically the same treadmill over and over and over again. You could instead play a different game mode except they are ALL locked behind needing to complete the story mode. I’ve been playing a handful of days and I’m only about halfway through with all the cars they want you to get through in the story. It’s just not worth it to get the endless mode unlocked because I will already be burned out in the experience by the time I get to it. About the time I really started to feel the burnout of this repetitive car upgrade grind that just kept getting reset every level I noticed a little corner pop up to buy in-game currency (to upgrade the car faster without having to keep running the same static levels) and it made more sense why this endless repetative task is here and why all the other modes are locked behind it. You either need to grind forever if you only paid a dollar for the game, or you can pay more to bypass a lot of the tedium. It’s kind of a crappy way to go about your monetization. Overall I like the moment to moment experience. But every time I complete a level and everything I worked for gets thrown in the trash and I get another underpowered car to start all over with it drags more and more on me and I just don’t want to keep playing.
Review by WingedBeaux on Earn to Die 2.