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
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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 vast majority of the zombies you face attack in the same way, rushing towards you until you knock them back with a kick to start the dull attack process. There are some special zombies that remain unchanged from those in Dead Island, including charger, spitter, and boomer types; they have slightly different movesets here, but you end up tackling them in exactly the same way, because your options are so limited. For a game so focused on combat, it's galling that you spend most of your time wanting to avoid zombies, just so you can spare yourself the resulting tedium.
Using a vehicle to get around takes some of the edge off of that tedium, because ploughing through groups of zombies in a jeep or cutting through them in a rickety old boat is far quicker than melee. Inevitably, though, you're still forced to engage in hand-to-hand combat once you reach your destination. Guns do arrive much later, but the weedy, inaccurate shooting isn't something to look forward to. Neither are Riptide's few horde missions, where you must protect your base from an onslaught of evil zombies. You can put up fences, lay mines, and take on a few side quests (of the fetch variety, naturally) in order to strengthen your defences, but it's all moot: just repeat your trusty "kick, swipe, back off" pattern a few hundred times, and the job's done.
Your reward for the hard combat slog is experience points, which are used to level up your character and unlock new skills, such as increased weapon accuracy and faster recovery times. Not that they make a whole lot of difference to the way the game plays, mind: it's all about keeping your level up to that of the zombies around you so you can fetch those items for other characters. Fortunately, levelling up is swift thanks to generous XP allocations, frequent checkpointing, and a death system that gives you unlimited lives, with the only penalty being the loss of cash you may have earned during missions or scrounged from the environment.
Riptide's role-playing game elements mean that as much as you might want to, you can't avoid combat entirely. But then, even if you did, what you'd be left with is a shallow husk of a storyline and an irritating cast of characters that you'd much rather see turned into a bloody mess than offered rescue. Not to mention that if you played the original Dead Island, there's not much new to see here. There's so little to like in Riptide that mustering up the enthusiasm to reach the lacklustre ending is a challenge for only the most hardcore of zombie fans to take on.
And don't try enlisting a few friends for some four-player co-op: it doesn't make the game any more exciting. Sure, having a few friends around makes those hordes disappear a little faster, and there are some extra quests you can take on, but the core experience remains as glacial as ever. Riptide is dumb, and mind-numbingly slow, and somehow manages to make the art of zombie-slaying feel like utter tedium. And if slaying zombies isn't fun in a game that's all about slaying zombies, why bother?
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.
28 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?
@Mvdforever @sma3 @WWE6427 @ErickPS4 @Devils-DIVISION @ALG_82 @amberpelt FUCK THE FUCKING FUCKERS!!!
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.
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Dead Island: Riptide (Special Edition)
Not Following
- Publisher(s): Deep Silver
- Developer(s): Techland
- Genre: Action
- Release:
- ESRB: M
Dead Island: Riptide Navigation
