Dead Island Riptide Review

First things first, Techland were right not to call Dead Island Riptide, Dead Island 2, because it isn’t. It’s essentially a glorified expansion pack to the original released in late 2011. The graphics, sounds and gameplay are all virtually the same as they were back then and the four troubled survivors all return, with the addition of one new playable character. This is not necessarily a bad thing as the original, despite a plethora of technical issues, found somewhat of a cult following in the gaming community who found heaps of fun in the gratuitous violence that you could dole out on the unsuspecting undead.

So will you like the new instalment? That largely depends on one key question. Were you one of those who found a home for the original, or were its issues just too great to constantly overlook?

As touched upon above the presentation is nigh on identical to the original Dead Island. When viewed from a distance the graphics can actually be quite nice, with long draw distances and nice lighting effects. The closer you get though the more you realise that the textures up close are shoddy and although the characters in general are nicely rendered, the animations are jerky and clumsy. Alls the same on the sound front too, the music is suitably eerie and crescendos at the right moments, but any immersion from this is doused by the voice work. At its best its terrible, at its worst its down right comical, and not in a good way. One bit of credit I will give to Techland is in recognising that the original really began to grate once you got to the towns and cities, and as such Riptide is much more rural for along longer which, if anywhere, is where the environments are at their best.

It is the same tune when we come to the gameplay aswell. As with the original, the game is heavily focused on melee combat, only doling out guns at infrequent intervals with limited ammunition. Thankfully this time weapons degrade less rapidly than before, meaning you can use your weapons for more than two kills before they need repairing. As before you have a choice between the four survivors; Logan the throwing expert, Sam B the tank, Xian Mei the blades expert and Purna the gun nut., however Riptide introduces a fifth character to the fray, John, a stereotypically arrogant ex soldier who prefers to do his talking with his fists, usually with some form of brass knuckles or Wolverine style claws attached. Sticking in keeping with the expansion style theme, you start by default at level 15, which is handy as it prevents the early level grind that brought down the original. Also, in a neat addition, you can import your previous character from Dead Island with all their stats and upgrades intact.

The story is the stuff of shoddy B-Movie horror films with more backstabbing than a typical episode of Jeremy Kyle and sadly, not as much horror. It rips on virtually every horror cliché in the book and the story suffers for it, as combined with the woeful voice acting, it creates zero sense of immersion. There is also a distinct lack of tension that was also present in the original. The fact that if you die, and you will a lot, you respawn a matter of feet away with the only setback a few pounds gone out of your wallet means there is zero fear of death. Nowhere is this more noticeable than the ‘Dead Zones’, one of the games few new features. These are basically a number of small confined spaces that crop up every now and again and you can choose to take on the horde of zombies that lie within and be rewarded with some rare loot. However, what should be terrifying crawl though abandoned shacks whilst you try and pick off the nasties one by one, quickly deteriorates in a vicious cycle of chipping away at an opponents health, dying, respawning two feet away and running back at it until eventually no more remain.

Speaking of new features, the other significant new addition comes in the form of a survivor meta game where you have to look after the survivors in a particular camp. This largely involves doing a bunch of grinding fetch quests to ‘level up’ your surviving buddies and the occasional horde style defence mission. These task you with setting up rudimentary defences before fighting a few waves of attacking zombies. These missions can actually be a refreshing change of pace from the usual running and gathering. However, watching your companions flail at thin air when no one is around, only to stand idly by while some zombie feasts on their mate not two feet away really makes you realise how dumb the AI can be at times.

Sadly these aren’t the only frustrations that mar the overall experience. Although personally I have only encountered the occasional graphical glitch, I have heard numerous reports of sound cutting out, graphics not loading correctly, and loading crashes all of which can require a hard reset to resolve. Thankfully the checkpointing is frequent, so if this does happen it will not set you back too much.

As with most games of this nature, bringing a friend along for the ride increases the experience ten fold. The drop in/ drop out co-op is easy to use and intuitive, and it is bar far one of the games best strengths. Even if you have no friends, its easy to join another player online, all you need to do is be in the same area as them and act on the cues that pop up informing you of another player in the region. The issues with there games are still present in multiplayer, if not worse worsened due to the increase in players. However, with friends aboard you tend to laugh at the issues rather then get frustrated at them.

Okay, will you be a fan of Dead Island Riptide? Once again I stress the point I made at the beginning. If you liked the original and were able to look past it many flaws, chances are you will be able to do the same with this. After all, smashing zombies with an electrified bat or other tool of death is still as fun as ever. However, if you wanted Riptide to be a true sequel that fixed the myriad of issues with the previous game and brought fresh new ideas to the table, you might want to steer clear. Ironically, that makes the rest of this review pretty redundant, as I have just looped back to the initial question but hey, you enjoyed reading it, right? Right?!

You can check out the launch trailer below. For any further questions feel free to chat to us on or myself personally on twitter .

About Michael Dalgleish