Dead Island: Riptide review

Dead Island: Riptide has unfortunate amount of baggage attached to it. The first game had great combat and a fantastic resort environment to explore, but once you left the resort, the rest of the game never lived up to the potential of those first few hours. Riptide represents developer Techland’s big second chance, their chance to prove that the great parts of Dead Island weren’t just a wonderful accident.

The story picks up right where the previous one left off. You were escaping by helicopter, but then you land on a boat that somehow gets infected with the zombie plague and crash on another nearby tropical island. That’s all you really need to know because it feels like the game stops caring about its story at this point. It’s bad enough to have a generic story with generic characters, but Riptide goes even further by retroactively changing the origin of the zombie plague. The first game told us it was a disease indigenous to the local cannibal tribe, which was a unique origin combining elements of real-life zombie voodoo myth and the more commercialized Night of the Living Dead/28 Days Later zombie mythos. Riptide reverses that for something far more generic and far less interesting.

None of the environments are as interesting as the resort from the first game. That location was great because it invoked a scary contrast between the swanky, slick façade of upper class escapism, and the merciless reality of death lurking just outside the hotel doors. Instead, Riptide is filled with what feels like standard game environments: A forest, a swamp, a sewer, and a city. Nothing particularly interesting, nothing particularly horrifying, these are all new environments, yet they feel so utterly familiar.

However, that over-familiarity is not all bad since it also means the great combat is still great. Individual zombies are still dangerous enough to be scary, which turns even the most casual of excursions into a grueling struggle. The core zombies, called Walkers, are easy to kill mano-a-mano but can take you down quickly if they gang up on you. Other creatures can strike from a distance, throwing explosives or vomiting acid. The Suiciders, who explode if you get too close, are the deadliest until you scrounge up some firearms. The most troublesome new "Riptide" monster is the Screamer, whose wails render you briefly confused and powerless.

Your weapons start off simple - say, a baseball bat or a kitchen knife - but as you explore Palanai, you'll discover more effective tools of destruction, from machetes to machine guns. "Riptide" also carries over the original game's clever weapon-crafting system, so you can create increasingly baroque devices like an electrified samurai sword

That's when you realize "Riptide" is essentially the same game as its two-year-old parent. There are a few new additions, like motorboats you can maneuver around Palanai's swamps, but almost every mission is the same: get from point A to point B without getting eaten. A handful of sieges, in which all the characters defend a base from undead swarms, break up the monotony, but too often I found myself asking, "This again?"

Unfortunately, Riptide also seems to have more technical issues than its predecessor, or at the very least its issues are more common so as to stay fresh in my mind for the entire length of the game. Deep Silver is justifying the repetition by pitching "Riptide" as an expansion of the "Dead Island" world rather than a true sequel; perhaps its creator, the Polish studio Techland, has some genuine innovations up its sleeve for "Dead Island 2." But that doesn't excuse the fact that "Riptide" is beset by the same glitches that marred the original, including graphical hiccups, goofy artificial intelligence, inconsistent maps and disappearing inventory items.

Despite such sloppiness - as well as plotting that's ridiculous even by zombie-story standards - "Riptide" is amusing in spurts, especially if you can gather an online posse to deal with the hungry hordes. Still, I wish Techland had spent some time addressing the series' problems rather than just shoveling out more of the same. Two stars out of four.