Dead Island: Riptide (2013)

• Playtime: 2,5 hours

• Played: 2026

• Context: I didn't care for the original game but loved Dying Light so i was curious about this.

Review

The Dead Island games are ARPGs in which you run/drive around an island, kill zombies and get white/green/blue/purple weapons with random modifiers. One of the problems is that it does the ARPG thing poorly. Where other ARPGs do interesting things with items (sockets, rune words, sets, uniques, etc) the weapons here are almost identical and boring.

Other ARPGs have a world that resets, but it requires you to restart or wait a while. Here everything respawns almost instantly. I was at the entrance to a quest location and it would respawn two enemies within seconds of me killing them, it was bizarre.

Itemisation being boring and everything being inconsequential is bad enough, but the worst part is the level design. It's claustrophobic. I returned from a mission on the beach and i couldn't take the path i entered through, i had to go quite a bit around. The entire map is like that, often with tiny fences blocking your path. And when you see a "stairway" of boxes next to a house, that doesn't mean you can climb it to get on the roof. There's an invisible wall. I didn't expect the fun parkour of Dying Light, but not being able to climb where even i could climb in real life? Awful.

There is also a worthless story, very limited crafting, barely functional finishing moves, etc. Just go play Dying Light instead.

What happened? That's mostly what I have to say. I played the first Dead Island with a friend, and although it has many flaws, I still recommend it playing co-op because it is incredibly fun. Ridiculous, but fun!

Now, we started playing this game, knowing that it is a direct sequel to the first game. Meaning, it starts right after the last cut scene of Dead Island. Riptide could have easily been Dead Island 1.5 or a very elaborate expansion. As soon as the game started, excitement turn into confusion, followed by disappointment. We could not even watch the first cutscene, because it would not load. Had to watch it on YouTube. In the end, we decided to stick to playing the game because we wanted to know what would happened to the characters and we just ended up making fun of how over the top and broken this game is. We played with the same characters we did in Dead Island.

For starters, there is almost nothing new to this game. There are like 2 new melee finishing moves and now you can climb vines, that's about it. In terms of graphics, it looks exactly the same, using the same assets for everything. Nevertheless, the performance is horrible. We found lots of glitches and bugs. Thankfully they were pretty funny and were good material for shorts and Instagram posts. The story has no nuance or depth. I already forgot the characters of the game. The dialogue is even worse than the first Resident Evil games (and that is hard to beat), and the edition of the cutscenes, wow... horrible and funny. They didn't make sense at all.

What I don't understand is, if the game is practically the same as the first one, how could they mess it up so badly? It will remain a mystery.