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Dead Island: Riptide
PC
Stunted Offshoot for Zombie Fans Only
3/5 stars
I'm unsure why I never got around to reviewing this the first time, but I'll give a briefer summary instead of the true full review treatment since it's been awhile since I finished this one.
Dead Island was a fun romp, full of b-movie, zombie killing fun that, despite its short-comings, was a pretty good zombie killing sandbox experience. It also had that killer trailer (that ultimately became more well-known than the game itself and had, in the end, little to do with actual gameplay). It's no surprise that Deep Silver and Techland came up with a sequel, but it's too bad they didn't learn from their mistakes and made essentially a carbon copy of the original with a few different settings but no real improvements and more glaring issues.
The game picks up where the original left off - our group of survivors from the zombie outbreak on the tropical paradise of Banoi, who find they are immune to the diseases, manage to escape the island by helicopter and land on a military ship, only to realize their ordeal is not over by a long shot. The immune are sedated but patient zero (the native Banoi Yerema) manages to bite one of the soliders who turns and infects the rest of the ship. The ship runs aground on another island in the Banoi archipelago and soon becomes infected as well. The survivors once again find themselves trying to figure out who they can trust and who will ultimately betray them, only to realize the reach of this outbreak has much more far-reaching consequences then they could ever imagine.
The gameplay is exactly the same as the original - a sandbox setting where you go around dispatching the roving zombies with the most powerful weapon you can muster. Once again, you can combine various recipes to give your weapons increases damage as well as elemental features like fire, poison and bleeding (though I still don't understand why zombies would be affected by bleeding or poison - but watching a zombie puke is still a lot of fun). The setting is a nice change of pace, but nothing has really been improved, it's more of the same with the same glitches and bugs, but no real improvement. The story doesn't have much of an impact and the characters are still cookie-cutter, generic faces.
Riptide is really more of an offshoot than a sequel. A true Dead Island 2 is reportedly in the works, but has been delayed. Techland broke off from Deep Silver and delivered the parkour-inspired and definite improvement Dying Light, thus it remains to be seen if this series ever gets another hot at getting things right.
Presentation: 3/5
Story: 3/5
Gameplay: 3/5
Replayability: 3/5
Overall (not an average): 3/5
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