Dead Island: Riptide review

I need to preface this review: I'm tired of zombies. It's been done. Let's move on.

But there are a few games that break this maleficent mould. The first Dead Island was such a game. Instead of zombies being an add-on, they were the gory icing on a surprisingly tasty action-cake. The game's blend of open world action, RPG side-quest and skill elements, as well as the makeshift manner of assembling and boosting your arsenal all put the survival element back into the zombie genre. Built from the ground up with multiplayer in mind, it was a blast solo or with friends. Put simply, despite the myriad of poor graphics, glitches, and texture loading issues which plagued the original game, it was gory zombie fun at its (almost) finest.

And now, less than two years later, we have the sequel. If you enjoyed the first, enjoyed the aforementioned core gameplay, Dead Island: Riptide will once again fill your zombie-killing fix. Same formula, only slightly better looking with greater urgency in its tone and a streamlined interface. Still, tragic unforgivable quirks keep it from earning the hallowed title of "classic."

The story picks up right where the first game left off. As the characters are escaping the resort of the first game, the ship they're on crashes onto an island. And guess who came with you? You didn't think escape from zombies would be that easy, did you? A race against an impending nuclear intervention by the government adds to the increased tension that pervades the game.

The game's structure follows its predecessor, but unlike the previous game where some of the missions felt superfluous, both main missions and side quests in Riptide have a certain urgency grounded in survival. Unfortunately, the gameplay eventually descends into a repetitive maelstrom of a formulaic fiasco: get asked to pick up an item, kill zombies, get item, kill zombies, return item, get asked to pick up a new item.

In the presentation department, while locales and character design have been given a much-needed boost in the graphics department, the game still lacks realistic looking characters. Voice acting is marred by stoney, marionette-like expressions of characters. And though settings are quite impeccably designed and lighted, the addition of weather effects causes periodic lags in frame rate, compounded when facing a larger group of enemies.

These complaints can be tempered somewhat by the impressive size and length of the game, the seamless improvements in the interface, the incredibly robust multiplayer mode, as well as the infrequency of load-times. Still, shoddy character graphics, no matter how you spin it, are still shoddy character graphics. Lags are still lags. No amount of game time can rid the player of these reminders that they're playing a video game and breaks in continuity.

Still, small improvements and graphical nudges aren't enough to elevate the game past anything but forgettable.

As a side note, my wife found it frustrating that I couldn't just save the game at any time. "You had to keep playing your firkin game until you found a save point," she reported (and asked me to report), "so we could turn it off and watch Walking Dead on Netflix."

That being said, if it's zombie killing you're looking for, Riptide has been tweaked from the first to make a more enjoyable experience. The underlying game has many endearing qualities. There's an inherent fun of the open world and the underlying gameplay, just like the first. As a reviewer, the game is substandard. But as a gamer, it was still fun to play.