Dead Island Riptide Reviews

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Written by WorstUsernameEver on April 22nd, 2013

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As fun as the sieges can be, they're also one of the places where Riptide is at its least stable. Though it generally looks and performs better than its predecessor, Riptide is still troublingly buggy and while it's not a huge deal if splashing water effects during fights slow down the framerate, or if adversaries sometimes spawn in weird places, sieges are the game's favorite places to outright crash. That issue will hopefully be patched soon after release, but playing our retail copy just days before Riptide's launch, the game froze about a dozen times in the middle of a siege and a boss fight, forcing us to power down and start over from the last checkpoint. Needless to say, it's an annoying problem.

On the plus side, Riptide performs well when played cooperatively: though it's entirely playable as a solo experience, it's more fun with friends alongside you (even though you're competing with them for loot), and being able to simply drop into the game of any player who's around the same point in the story as you means they don't need to be actual friends. While it's got some irritating rough patches, Dead Island: Riptide's 15-hour campaign still manages to be a lot more fun than it has any right to be.

Is Dead Island: Riptide a fun game? At times, yes. In terms of raw combat and power fantasy, it's just as good as Dead Island ... and it's just as bad at the same time. The bottom line is that there's no excuse for it not being superior. Being "just as good" isn't good enough, especially not when Dead Island had things on its side that Riptide doesn't. Those new to the series entirely will likely not notice the problems quite so much, and be as forgiving to it as newcomers were to Dead Island. While Riptide banks on you having loved the first, in actuality you have a lot more to gain if you've never touched it.

If you played the first game, however, I'd recommend waiting for a real sequel, because Riptide fails to get away with pulling the same trick twice.

There was a contingent of players that didn't have the problems I had with the original Dead Island. (Trust me, I heard from them.) They were perfectly content to have some brainless (zing!) fun with a few buddies. And I understand that. But I imagine even the most stalwart defenders of the series are going to be disappointed when they see just how little reason there is to travel from Banoi to Palanai.

What makes that so sad is that this feels like a series only a few great decisions away from being really good. A better script with a sense of humour, a bit more imagination in quest design, more coherent inventory management and character development... These things shouldn't be unattainable goals for a developer that must be flush from the unexpected success of the first game. If there is to be more Dead Island - and I wouldn't object to that - then those things must be high priorities for it to avoid another mauling.

As for Riptide? It's half-fun, but fittingly enough it's the boring stuff that ultimately kills it.

Riptide's role-playing game elements mean that as much as you might want to, you can't avoid combat entirely. But then, even if you did, what you'd be left with is a shallow husk of a storyline and an irritating cast of characters that you'd much rather see turned into a bloody mess than offered rescue. Not to mention that if you played the original Dead Island, there's not much new to see here. There's so little to like in Riptide that mustering up the enthusiasm to reach the lacklustre ending is a challenge for only the most hardcore of zombie fans to take on.

And don't try enlisting a few friends for some four-player co-op: it doesn't make the game any more exciting. Sure, having a few friends around makes those hordes disappear a little faster, and there are some extra quests you can take on, but the core experience remains as glacial as ever. Riptide is dumb, and mind-numbingly slow, and somehow manages to make the art of zombie-slaying feel like utter tedium. And if slaying zombies isn't fun in a game that's all about slaying zombies, why bother?

Side quests though many of which are boring fetch quests can sometimes feel like in depth adventures in their own rights. You'll have entire areas to explore basements or other dead zones.

Unfortunately, even by the 10ish hour mark when things start to get more tolerable, the last five or so hours never get good enough to excuse the rest of the game. The story starts to come together into a, well, story, and the combat doesn't feel like you're slapping people with a fish while they shoot rockets at you, and you may even have some extra missions to explore, but it's never fun. And it's still almost always broken.

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