This. Game. Sucks. I don't know any other way to put it. The combat is clunky. The gameplay stinks. There are so many things wrong with this game. It's an absolute rental - if that.
So the game takes place 5 years after the first one. Okay, great. The storyline hasn't improved at all. The voice acting is really cheesy and just not good. The dialog is half-spoken, half-written. Much of the dialog they expect you to be able to read before it vanishes while you try and fight the undead.
The time constraints are awful. You're always given several missions to complete at once. You pick which ones you want to do, before they expire. Along the way, you find stragglers that you can help out and bring back to the saferoom. Some of them use weapons, some of them don't. Some of them walk slow, some of them don't. You're never told "who is what", so you might end up dragging along a drunk stripper back to the saferoom while your daughter is dying without the anti-zombie meds and voila, you might not make it back in time to save her. Mission failed, restart from about half an hour ago. Half an hour of your life wasted because the game couldn't do some simple foreshadowing.
So lets say you manage to get a good straggler, and take them back to the saferoom before you other missions' timers run out. Cool, so you're on your way! Oh but wait, whats this? You just walked into a mall on your way to this mission on a timer and you're expected to fight a fat retard with a tiger for a pet that apparently wants to eat your "fresh meat". You're now expected to fight a boss with no warning beforehand. OH YEAH- and there is no autosave. You've got to visit one of a few bady placed restrooms to save your game. So, consider this: You set out to complete a mission, you find a straggler, you backtrack to deliver the straggler to the saferoom, you head back out to do your mission, you get 3/4 of the way there and have to fight a boss, you die due to being unprepared since you were not warned of a bossfight beforehand. You lost close to an hour of time of your day that you have to then do-over. FUN!
Lets speak on the crafting for a moment. You're given a million different ways to smash the heads of the undead - AWESOME! So you're a mission or two into the game an you're given the keys to the maintenance rooms that you need to craft weapons. The maintenance rooms are just about as common as the gamesave restrooms. Not that common, but not that rare. Okay... fine. So you want to make some awesome weapons? Well here are your options: grind zombies for hours to unlock "level up"s and get one single card per level (this will take ages and you may as well play the game without trying to unlock weapon combination this way), OR you can just pick up every weapon you find, throw it on the table, and hope that the option to "Combine" shows up. I suggest looking up the combination online. The system they expect you to use to discover your own combinations is just awful - it takes a long time to run back to the maintenance room due to the slow "running" speed, and all that for a temporary weapon. That's right, the weapons degrade and simply vanish with a goofy sound effect.
I could go on and on about how horribly designed and flawed the game is, but I'll leave it to you to make your own judgment. Please don't buy this game before you play it. Rent it, borrow it, do whatever you have to do. Do not buy this game unless you're absolutely sure that you like it. Don't believe the hype - this game, in my opinion, is just bargain bin rental rubbish.
(PS - I didn't play much multiplayer but I imagine this would be the only reason to ever buy this game, and from what I DID play of the multiplayer; I couldn't really squeeze $50.00 worth of fun out of it so it's just not worth it. Save your money for something good like New Vegas)
