What do we get when we drop some survivors on another jungle island, just hours after hacking their way off the last?
A pretty nice array of set in stains, I tell you what.
Game: Dead Island: Riptide
Platforms: Microsoft Windows (Reviewed), PlayStation 3, Xbox 360
Developers: Techland
Publisher: Deep Silver
Released: April 26, 2013 (Global)
Genre: Action Role-Playing, Survival Horror
ESRB/Pegi: M/18
Number of Players: 1 to 4
MSRP: (Currently) $39.99
Official website or Wiki page: http://deadisland.deepsilver.com/
What it's like?: Dead Island. Yep. That's it.
Plot:
The characters from the first game, and some new guy they meet randomly, crash on another of Banoi's islands and get wrapped up in another frankly ridiculous plot to exploit the virus and their immunity to it.
Bias factor:
I spent a lot of time playing the first Dead Island satiating my lust for achievements, and really burned myself out on it. The game was good, but I didn't love it.
So, the game?:
Dead Island: Riptide is more of the same of everything Dead Island had to offer. The items and inventory system, leveling and skill trees, Stamina system that keeps you holding your breath, death robbing you of your money, XP for challenges, all the general gameplay aspects.. Everything.
Panoi is Banoi if you started the first game game in the jungle area. And I'm sure a lot of folks who played the first probably wished you could have. But what I really mean is a little more then just the aesthetics; the game literally starts you out as if you never did anything else, no build up, and were dropped in a place with every type of enemy you can encounter, and hordes of them, suggesting that this game really isn't a new game at all, but some sort of expansion... Which the makers of the game have denied... Sort of.. It was confusing.
Oh, and the character models and assets are all the same as the original, even Perna looks as wretched and bug eyed as ever! If only Naughty Dog thought to ask for a loan for The Last of Us; The Perna monsters would have been a hit.
There are some new weapons and weapon models in the game. My favorite of these are staffs, which are wild fast and have a tendency to hit more then one enemy if they're grouped up. Be warned though, this doesn't make it a super weapon, they do seem to break pretty easy, after all, its just a really good one to have around if your planning on needing to flail around. (but sadly, there is no flail that I know of. Bet I could just look it up now, but why waste the mystery?)
And like the first game, leveling still doesn't mean a lot because the zombies level with you, negating pretty much all the upsides to a leveling system, even the skill points you get as a reward for your troubles.. And the funny part about that is you level really fast in this one. You already start at level 15 if you didn't already have game data for the four characters from the first game (or if you start with the new character, who I'll talk about in a little), but within a little over 2 hours of starting I had almost 15 levels under my belt and was nearing level 30. It was redonkulous.
Riptide turns out to be an adequate name for the game, not really because a monsoon just happened across the archipelago, but because just about everything you'll encounter through the first part of the game is waste high under water. Its implied that it's because of the monsoon, but really it just seems to be an excuse to slow you down and create some drowned zombie jump scares, when you should be more scared of these zombies because they're absolute beasts when ganging up on you.
This leads to a need for boat driving.. Sigh, boating.. Listen, frustrating isn't even the word for it: Shitastic would be. Yeah, it does make it slightly faster to navigate the waterways of Panoi, but frankly, the zombies are still often faster, even in water, and theres a very quick quick time event to knock them off, which, in my ineptness, I often failed, and got thrown off the boat, only to be swarmed and killed by all the zombies that were trailing behind me and caught up. I just found it far faster to walk the waterways and preemptively kill the obviously-not-dead zombies before they can ever pop out. Really, I only found it useful to use a boat when the objectives of the game specifically forced you to use a boat. Go put on your clam diggers and wade in the water, hopefully you'll thank me.
Speaking of driving things, driving a truck is exactly the same as the original. They didn't change a a single thing about it, right down to the shit handling. Have fun crashing and getting caught up on small plants. Whoever supplies these people with their vehicles should be ashamed of themselves.
This game throws you into the action really fast, but with little to no tutorials this time around. The ship at the beginning of the game is meant to lead you through all that, but it really doesn't do a good job of it. Even after knowing what to expect from playing the first game, I still had questions about how to work this one, and it was simply because I had forgotten the last one just enough to warrant my confusion with this one. I can't imagine how lost I'd be if I didn't know what I was getting into.
Then you just hit an endless chain of zombie ambushes. Kill a few zombies in front of you, when your sure no ones behind you, because you've killed them all, but no, suddenly more guys are getting up as you kill the ones in front of you, seeking retribution for their zombie brethren.
The time is now, not 3 seconds go. AMBUSH!
Then there were the times I got killed at least a handful of times without a single clue why. Zombies coming at me from the front, nothing, not even corpses, to the side or behind me and wham! Bam! Thank you, I'm dead! Okay frustrating. Couldn't get worse, right?.. Oh, okay, good: They spawned me right in the middle of the zombie pile I was backing away from. Awesome.
I spent 90% of the time in this game near Deaths doorstep, with him waving me in for a landing with his scythe, and I was often coming in too fast, even for him. At least all this made me think more tactically then the last one, so I guess thats something. But what that really means is I found myself running more then fighting in this one, but that does nothing for you when you've got the zombie track team right on your heels. I often found myself almost begging to be grabbed (which did happen a lot more in this game then I remember in the last) just so I could regain stamina without really taking much damage. Because getting grabbed and doing a simple quick time event was simply easier then trying to be fast enough to run away. And, like the last game, circling around bashing an enemy, usually tougher ones, when few others are around, can equal out to a easy win.
So I wasn't really being "tactical" as much I was "exploiting the mechanics".
Oh and it seems like there's a bigger chance to break limbs then I can remember from the first one for some reason. I don't know, I just saw break break break break BREAK, far more then I ever did in the first game.. And I had played as Sam B back then, it should have been my entire strategy.
Holding the back (and I assume select) button on a controller brings up a quick menu wheel that I don't remember being in the prior game, which is actually pretty useful for quicky going to the map or skill screens. But the overall feel of the controls can be slow, and not nearly as smooth as I think they intended them to be. And thats just the start of the technical issues I ran into:
Getting hit while healing cancels out the healing, but you get so swarmed sometimes its impossible to heal before your being ripped to shreds. This is something I seem to remember from the first one, and I wish they had fixed it, because wasting any animation in the game seems be a asking for the death countdown.
It's really far too easy to get caught on environment pieces, like tiny, inconsequential, foliage, totally screwing you when the zombies are closing in on you. Then it seems to be even easier for you to clip through enemies, leaving you even more vulnerable then you were simply being in front of them.
Become one with the zombie.. So you can die like a chump.
While running around the game kept giving me a "grab item" icon when there isn't anything to grab. There's nothing else to say about that other then its frustrating to stop short to loot, because the game is a loot-fest, just to try to recreate the circumstances of the phantom icon.
"Event attacks," like jumping from a high place to stomp on a zombie, leave you way, way, WAY too vulnerable. They're just simply not worth it unless they're only against a single enemy, maybe two. And thats if they work. Forget about it if they bug out on you and don't trigger.
Maybe more of a design flaw then a technical bug-a-loo, the back and forth tracking in the game gets really tedious, probably faster then it did in the first game.. And I'm starting to believe that if I didn't play the first game, this wouldn't have bothered me that much. I'm finding it really hard to keep this game separated from the other.
Also, more within the realm of design flaws, my first claw/knuckle weapon had to come from a quest. Now, I'm sure that it was just a matter of the games random loot not spitting anything I really needed out, but I didn't start getting the weapon my character was really made for until after I got one from that quest.. And I remember it being this way in the first game too, with that game waiting forever to give you items your character calls for. It just becomes annoying knowing your character should be gravitating towards a certain weapon style, because his skill set specifically asks you to do that, and not get one of those weapons until too late in the game. It devalues the skills your taking, and overvalues the weapons you shouldn't be using.
And there's a few too many "save the person being attacked" quests randomly placed all about. It's probably just a nitpick (of many, I'm sure). I just have a hard time wanting to saving them, then having them ball up on top of their campers not running off hoping to meet up with one of the proven safe havens I've visited and could point them to. It makes me feel like kicking them off a ledge (and oddly, they were mostly put near many ledges)
But wait, what about that new character?! Thanks for reminding me, cause this guys sort of important in his new-ness.
The new character's name is.. Wait for it.. You waiting? Good.. Okay... Captain Morgan... Wha-really?! Wheres.my.rum?
And what better defines the good Captain more then his ability to do the can-can? Having grown up in the New York tri-state area in the 80's and 90's, I can help but think of Shoprite's can-can sales ads that I grew up with. Not that that's at all relevant to anything, but that's what this character is good at: kicking.. well.. And fist fighting, but fuck that, because to do that, you have to get in close. CLOSE. It's like Cap'n Morgan is a Velociraptor. Seriously, even his chosen weapon to use is claws (pictured above). He just lacks the scales and that winning smile (and the trademark cleverness).
Actually, he lacks the rum guys smile too. And barrel. Sad.
With this guy, no stamina means, like everything else: Your screwed. You can still kick and hope to knock back enemies, and only do 1 damage while you do it, but forget about throwing a punch. Not even a limp slap.
Really, if you decide to choose this guy as your meat suit, just know he plays pretty much exactly like Sam B does, and that actually make it worse to me, because Sam B was who I played as in the first game, so this still feels like more of the same. I thought I was being smart picking the new kid on the block. Shows what I get for thinking.
Also know that if you use him, it maybe wise to take point you can get in anything having to do with health regeneration, kicking damage and, I'm going to say it, death-tax mitigation (the act of lessening the loss of money due to death), because you'll die.. A lot... And before you do, you'll be doing far more kicking and stomping (before you die and start to kick and stomp in an whole different way), then you will be throwing punches, and you have to basically be a vampire while doing it.
Oh, and watch out for trying to kick for the head. You can do it, and its worth it, but it leaves you pretty vulnerable. But then again this is Dead Island.. Your pretty vulnerable no matter what you do.
So should you spend your time on this game?:
Ehhh... Maybe. If you liked the first one, and that one wasn't enough for you, then yes. If you got bored half way through the first one and only moved on to see if it'd get better, then no, because this is basically like another level. Its broken in pretty much all the ways that the original was, with all the same trappings surrounding those bugs, so I'd say, go for it if your looking for some fun, but your expectations are low. It was actually a pretty decent weekend with this game.
Overall Rating:
2 Bea Aurthers, out of 5.
Disclaimer: I was able to play the game because Valve and/or Deepsilver was gracious enough to make it free on the weekend of September 27th, 2013, through Steam. Valve and Deepsilver don't have a clue who I am and I probably owe them more then they'll ever owe me. Making it as far as I could in that short period, I did so solo. That said, I'm sure that even if I didn't get through the whole thing, I saw all I needed to see in the first hour of playing. Also, because I'm a moron and am still new to this, I forgot I was playing on the PC and could snap screenshots -go me- so the images above are from around the web, hence there being more then one character in most of them.
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