3 Like I always trust Gamespot with their rating system. It has proven to be extremely accurate for me personally. Face it, this game was terrible.
Dead Island: Riptide Review
Game Emblems
The Bad
Dead Island: Riptide might look like an idyllic zombie-fest, but it's little more than a frustrating mess of half-baked ideas and repetitive combat.
The Good
- Cool blood effects and dismemberments.
The Bad
- Boring, repetitive missions
- Weak voice acting and dialogue
- Soulless, irritating characters
- Frustrating combat.
It starts promisingly enough: a mad dash off a sinking ship, a military coup, and a zombie horde just aching to be shown the business end of a shotgun. And then, just like that, the promise is taken away. Dead Island: Riptide teases far more in its opening minutes than it ever manages to deliver across its lengthy campaign. There's no drama, and little excitement. Instead, there's a rehash of old ideas, combat that's fun for all of five minutes, and a seemingly never-ending slog of repetitive missions filled with characters that have the emotional depth of a wet sponge. If there were ever a video game equivalent of smacking your head against a brick wall, Riptide would be it.
The story--and that's using the word generously--is filled with the sort of terrible dialogue, hammy voice acting, and cliches you'd expect to see in an awful zombie spoof, or at best, a trashy B movie. But there's no sense of humour or self-awareness here: to Riptide's detriment, it takes itself very seriously. And that seriousness is hard to swallow when you have to look after a bunch of shallow, argumentative characters who utter irritating swears every few minutes and prove so unlikable that you're willing them to be torn apart by the zombie horde, just so you can have some peace and quiet. Then there's the plot itself, which endlessly meanders between government conspiracy, sci-fi, and human interest, without even the slightest sense of direction.
This all makes it so very hard to care about anything that happens in Riptide. By the time you drag yourself through to the disappointing ending, apathy has taken over to the point where you wouldn't bat an eyelid at even the most grand of revelations. And that's only if you can muster up enough energy to make it that far. Riptide's sandbox island of Hanoi isn't filled with the fun zombie-killing adventures you might expect. Instead, there are fetch quests: lots of fetch quests. And within those fetch quests are yet more fetch quests.
Nearly every single one of the main missions and side quests requires you to head over to a part of the island, find an item, and bring it back to base. Often, before you can retrieve said item, the game makes you fetch something for the person who holds the item, thus creating a fetch quest within a fetch quest. What's more, the narrative reasoning behind each quest is questionable. Why some stranded villager might be after a few measly bucks when the entire island has been overrun with flesh-eating zombies that threaten the very existence of humankind is puzzling.
To make matters worse, the combat that ties the whole thing together remains largely unchanged from that of Dead Island, which is to say it's massively frustrating. The focus is on melee weapons, ranging from blunt objects like baseball bats and shovels, through to blades like carving knives and sickles. Most can be upgraded using items scavenged from around the island, with hidden blueprints giving you access to wilder designs. And initially at least, bludgeoning a zombie to death with an improvised, nail-covered baseball bat is amusing, thanks to the resulting blood splatters, severed limbs, and grisly sound effects.
The limitations of the combat soon become clear, though. Attacking zombies still feels wildly inaccurate, slow, and very dull, making it difficult to truly master. The result is that the combat quickly deteriorates into a repetitive mess as you kick a zombie backward, flail randomly at it, back off while it attacks, and then repeat the whole process ad nauseam. A stamina bar ensures you can't just spam an attack--particularly when you're using heavier weapons that drain the bar faster--but rather than giving the game a more realistic feel, it just further enhances the dull combat.
By
Mark Walton, Senior Staff Writer - Reviews
Writer, riff maker, purveyor of fine foods. Mark currently spends his days trying to overcome his small (large) obsession with high-top trainers and mobile games. He's known to respond well to Long Island Iced Tea, falafels, and karaoke, but not necessarily in that order.
27 comments
3 Like 
Thats why i love gamespot, they always give the real score haha! This game is sooooooooooooooooooooo badddddddddddddd! Is one of the worst zombie games i ever played in my entire life... Is boring, awful voice acting, characters and story, poor combat and so on... How can someone say this game is good are you kidding me! LOOOL!
1 Like 4.0 ....... Are you F$^&ing kidding me. GS you guys are a bunch of r-tards. A F$#&ing 4.0. Learn how to review games you twits.
Hmm some games have been using the same flawed gaming engine for years Dead Island is indeed not perfect but i have played the first one and if this one is the same then i think it should merit at least a 6 or a 7 but this is his review and his opinion is his opinion i will agree the bugs and glitches are annoying as hell but if you ignore those than your treated to a pretty solid game specially when you have more than 1 human player involved.
1 Like I did not play the first one, but I have been playing this game for the last week and up to level 50-ish.
From what I've seen and played... I don't think it is fair to give this game a 4.... by far...
I've played worse game that was given a higher score! what the heck?
1 Like Wow, like I didn't see that low score coming. I mean, come on the first one was horrible. I have it for PC and played it for 40+ hours and it was so buggy and full of glitch's, but I swore to never get the next one coming from this company. I am glad that I didn't. I know a lot of people that purchased the game on Steam and PS3 and are complaining that the game is terrible. I really wanted to like the first one so badly, I even pre-ordered it, but it was just terrible. I was not even able to connect with my friends, the missions were all messed up when I got the chance to join a friends game. When I went back to my own I have missions that I didn't even except. I have no problem purchasing a game. I just want it to work. The first one and this one could have been great. What were the programmer's thinking? Oh, all the people that are saying "the game is not all that bad" might not have experienced the terror of the first one. For god sake, my friend that lives abroad I was not even able to connect to him..
@IamOnlyoneMan Meh, I played and beat the first one. It wasn't terrible, I've definitely played worse games with better reviews. I could see buying this game for like $20 max.
1 Like Its actually quite fun to play, but the way the missions are structured it may as well be named "Fetch Quest: The Game".
1 Like The game doesn't look as bad as the review says... and by the way, its pretty awkward to take a review into account when the player is clearly not used to the controls... on the videos, the player is constantly kicking and punching around for no reason. He says you "simply" need to follow a pattern to kill zombies but still gets knocked down by them.
Wow, that's harsh. The game isn't even full-priced. I've been playing for two hours and it's honestly pretty fun. The only real complaint I have is the voice acting being inconsistent. Some characters sound excellent and some are really horrible. Otherwise it's very entertaining and less buggy than the first game.
Note: You can also import character saves to keep your levels/skills/weapons/inventory.
Overall I'd definitely give this game a 6.5 or a 7. It absolutely refines the original Dead Island and adds TONS of content. If you liked the first game, Riptide is worth $40 for sure.
1 Like The game is still fun if you're playing with your friends who aren't serious to the bone. This game is definitely a fun co-op experince!~
1 Like it is completely beyond me how people are actually spending money for a production where the whole world already saw their engine in part 1 and that this engine was far from being technically up to date. when do people start to realize the difference between a real effort - a new development - and a low-effort - cashing in on the same engine twice, or more. why do they want to pay for the same game over and over again? just why? what is wrong with human dna??
It seems like this game followed greatly in its predecessor's footsteps but was this game really that bad? I doubt it but that is what I think and maybe others...
Ouch. I am enjoying the new character, but I could see it getting a bit repetitive. Still, 4 is harsher than I would rate it.
Conversation powered by Livefyre
Dead Island: Riptide (Special Edition)
Not Following
- Publisher(s): Deep Silver
- Developer(s): Techland
- Genre: Action
- Release:
- ESRB: M
Dead Island: Riptide Navigation
