I’ve been gaming since I was a wee boy. My first computer was the C64 and from that moment my life changed. Amigas, SNES’, N64’s, PS1’s, Xbox’s and numerous other devices have been and gone and in that time thousands of games have passed my eyes. Some good, some bad, some great, some terrible. Some with amazing storylines, some with outstanding graphics, some that draw you in and some that make you wish you’d never spent your hard earned cash on it.
Dead Island Riptide is one of the latter. In a big way!
It should have been all so easy. Lovely location - Check. Chance of a great storyline - Check. Numerous playable characters - Check. Differing skill trees - Check. Plenty of weapons - Check. Collectibles galore - Check. Zombies - Check, check check!
So what the bloody hell has gone wrong? Um.....near enough everything, but I’ll get onto that in a bit.
You start off by picking a character. There are 5 in total (or you have the chance to import your character from the original Dead Island), and each has their own unique skill set and background story. A prime opportunity to hit the gamer with multiple storylines no? Each character is however much of a muchness and despite the cracking backstories each gets thrown into the game in the exact same way and none make you want to care for them in any positive way. Storywise, after a brief encounter on a ship you find yourself washed up on a beach. Some woman (I have no idea who this woman is because it’s near enough impossible to interact anymore with her other than to try and listen to what she has got to say), tells you to go and find the local camp whilst she searches for more survivors. And from then on in you’re greeted by stale boring mission after stale boring mission. Erect some fences, blow up some barrels, search the beach for supplies, find a boat, blahdy blahdy blah. Obviously each mission has it’s fair share of zombies in the way and praise the lord they are, as the combat is one of the few high points in the game. Far Cry 3 with zombies this is not!
Much of those combat highlights come down to the enormous variety of weapons at your disposal. As I’ve previously touched on there are plenty of weapons scattered around the island of Palanai and they are all needed to defeat the zombie hordes. Each weapon, from the basic knives and planks of wood up to the slightly more advanced nail and flare guns can be upgraded or repaired. You kinda find yourself making a choice early on in the game as to which way you are going to play. Are you one of those guys who is going to go searching all areas for modification items and therefore repair and upgrade your weapons as you go, or are you going to run around smashing the living hell out of zombies with whatever useful thing you can get your hands on at the time? With each weapon only having a limited lifespan, you really do need to choose which way you are going to go in order to stand any chance against the tougher zombies in the latter parts of the game.
Another decent addition is that of the stamina bar. Each attack you make sees your stamina deplete and after only a few left and right hooks you’ll be needing to back off for a bit to regain some of your depleted hit power. There’s not much chance of taking numerous foes out in one big hit unless you equip yourself with a powerful ranged weapon or two, and with that you leave yourself open to close up attacks. Knowing when to run and hide for a bit is needed if you’re going to have any success in Riptide.
But now for the many many negatives and believe me, other than the weapon variety and stamina bar, there ain’t much good going for this paradise isle.
Whilst the background scenery is of a fair standard all other graphics are poor, especially those of the NPC’s littered around the place. Acting is downright disgraceful and the dodgy Aussie/South African/Alien accents grate on you from the very first minute to the very last. Maybe they’d be a bit better if a hint of emotion was thrown in but that seems to have been discarded long again. What rubbish conversations you do manage to get going with the non-playable characters sometimes seem to get stuck on a loop and just repeat themselves over and over again. Other times you’ll get 2 or 3 conversations running at the same time making it near impossible to understand any of them. The subtitles are no better and can pop up or disappear at the drop of a hat, sometimes going awol mid-conversation or at other times will suddenly appear when noone is actually speaking. Even worse is when the same thing happens to your ‘helpful hints’. Not very helpful if you can’t read the bloody things!
On numerous occasions I also had graphical issues. At the top of the list is the constant juddering, slowdown and basic lag that accompanies even the single player game. At times the slowdown and motion sickness would get so bad that the best thing to do was to switch off the game altogether. Getting stuck in a wormhole on the beach was also pretty common, as was ‘suddenly’ becoming out of my depth in the sea. But my favourite by far was falling into a log cabin. Surrounded by zombies you’d think you would be pretty safe inside a 4 walled structure, but the fact you could get attacked THROUGH THE WALLS meant it wasn’t the safe haven I thought it would be! For those unsure of what I’m getting at, all three of these issues resulted in a slow painful death and unfortunately this type of thing was pretty common place throughout.
I was also struggling big time with the tiny menus icons. I can see the need for not taking up too much screen real estate whilst in game, but I could barely read what was going on in the menus either......and this was sitting 6ft from a 42 inch screen with by bestest reading glasses on!
As for multiplayer, well, you get the chance to let others jump in or out of your game as they so wish. You can obviously do the same by getting involved in their games as well but if you were expecting anything to be different from the single player aspect, you’ll be very much mistaken. If anything, the slowdown is probably even more common and the sight of watching your ‘friend’ get attacked whilst they are browsing menus is one of sheer hilarity. A system link co-op version is also available but I’d be pretty happy to hazard a guess and say that’s poorly executed as well.
Dead Island Riptide could have been so good, in fact, it should have been so good. It has however ended up a right old confusing shabby mess and unless you’re happy to play a game that the developers and publishers obviously aren’t overly bothered about then I’d keep away from it in about the same way as you’d keep away from a real zombie. It is probably one of the most broken games I've ever had the misfortune of stumbling upon and there doesn’t seem to be any sign of a patch or 5 coming along anytime soon to fix it.
Utter tripe and pretty close to one of those magical 1* review.
