Dead Island: Riptide Review

Posted By Robert G. about 3 weeks, 4 days ago

Dead Island: Riptide Review

When I first played Dead Island, I had to admit I was impressed by the work Deep Silver and Techland did with the zombie-shooter. True, it was buggy as all hell and the level up system is completely arbitrary, but it had a spark of fun and originality to it. The love child of Borderlands and Left 4 Dead, the original Dead Island had a beautiful setting and simple, but fun, gameplay.

The honeymoon is over now. The days of looking past imperfections are long gone, especially considering the next installment of the franchise, Dead Island: Riptide, has finally graced the gaming world. With Riptide, Deep Silver didn’t change a thing, which is good news for fans of the series at least, but bad for overall quality.

When I say Deep Silver didn’t change anything, I mean it. You essentially have a copy job of what was seen in Dead Island in a new setting. Throw in some new features and minor gameplay tweaks, and Riptide essentially feels more like an overstuffed expansion pack than a full-fledged game. Sadly, the same mechanical issues found in the previous installment rear their ugly head, including several game breaking bugs.

Do not get Riptide on the PlayStation 3. It is completely broken and barely playable. Muddled textures, constant frame rate dips, poor hit detection, graphical pop-up, the list is nearly endless. To top it all off, the online matchmaking is ineffective to the point where you get kicked every five minutes. For me, the game was so intrusive I gave up, sold the disc to my local Gamestop, and shelled out twenty extra dollars to get the 360 version so that I can actually play it.

The experience is much better on Microsoft’s console. Sure, textures are still a bit muddy and I had maybe one or two moments where the frame rate dropped heavily, but that was it. No graphical pop-up, no hit detection problems, and I can actually match up with with other people online the way Riptide intended. The bugs still present on the 360 version are completely inexcusable, don’t get me wrong, but at least I can play the game and enjoy myself. So please, if you have to get it for a console, avoid the PlayStation 3 version at all costs.

New zombie types, like the wrestler here, provide new challenges for players.

As far as the rest of Riptide, it is essentially the same gameplay with minor tweaks. Your skill trees have been fattened slightly and you can go past level 50 to level 70, allowing you the chance to fill out your avatars skills even further than before. You can also import saves from the original game to save you time and energy leveling up, otherwise you start at level 15 when the game begins without imports, providing enough gameplay in the 12 hour experience to level up to at least level 45.

Unfortunately, the same issue with Dead Island is still present in Riptide: the RPG mechanics are wholly arbitrary. Because the zombies level up with you wherever you go, the game forces you to constantly switch out equipment and weapons to deal with them through pure DPS output. Compound this with the weapon degradation and the artificial economy going on, investing in weapons is often fruitless, making Riptide the most pointless RPG on the gaming market.

To give credit to Deep Silver, they did try to decrease the weapon degradation and offered new weapons and challenges to offset the weakness of the mechanics. Your skills also improve your ability to fight and do damage, but it still means little since the zombies level up with you. Interestingly enough, the RPG aspect of Dead Island is strongest with a balanced party of four, since each avatar, including newcomer John Morgan, has a weapon specialty and functional bonus that offsets the weakness of each character. This allows you to do high DPS and forget the artificial leveling for a moment.

Other new features in Riptide include the new siege moments, where you essentially defend your base of operations from a zombie invasion. The siege levels do spice things up enough to give a sort of horde mode in between quests lines, and do require some preparation to be successful. You can also perform fetch quests for character to level up their fighting abilities and the items in their shops to better survive against the enemies in Riptide. Deep Silver also added new zombie types and an emphasis on using boats, a dangerous but necessary mode of transportation on the flooded island of Palanai.

Same old gameplay, for good or for ill.

The biggest crime however is the fact that the gameplay remains unchanged regarding combat. You still hack, slash, kick, and shoot your way through the undead in the first-person. You still do quests to find money and supplies, mods for weapons, and use strategy to take down special infected. If this bored you in the first Dead Island, it will not be any different from that experience. You are trading the beginnings of the outbreak for a more linear but clichéd B-movie storyline, and a sandy beach resort for a flooded jungle. Even the new features boil down to how good you are at killing groups of charging zombies, especially in the siege battles.

It’s not that it is even a bad game, unless if you play the PlayStation 3 version of course. Rather, Riptide just doesn’t bring anything to the table. The new mission types and scenery are nice, the attempted focus on story is a plus, but the gameplay is monotonously tedious and the role-playing aspects are essentially pointless.

It’s a strange thing indeed, that what makes Riptide fun is also its biggest weakness as a game. I guess this is why Dead Island: Riptide is the type of game that fans will fully enjoy. Despite the bugs and the irrelevance of its own mechanical base, fans will find some carnal enjoyment dismembering rotting corpses every ten seconds. It won’t convert any naysayers, but Riptide does keep the status quo long enough for a proper sequel, which is no doubt already being made.

A copy of the game was purchased for review purposes. It was played for about 5 hours on the PlayStation 3 before being traded in for an Xbox 360 copy, where it was played for an additional 5 hours. It is also available for PC.

Dead Island: Riptide Review

By Robert G.

It’s a strange thing indeed, that what makes Riptide fun is also its biggest weakness as a game.