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. Neither are Riptide's few horde missions, where you must protect your base from an onslaught of evil zombies. Guns do arrive much later, but the weedy, inaccurate shooting isn't something to look forward to. Inevitably, though, you're still forced to engage in hand-to-hand combat once you reach your destination. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Attacking zombies still feels wildly inaccurate, slow, and very dull, making it difficult to truly master. The limitations of the combat soon become clear, though. 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.
Most can be upgraded using items scavenged from around the island, with hidden blueprints giving you access to wilder designs. The focus is on melee weapons, ranging from blunt objects like baseball bats and shovels, through to blades like carving knives and sickles. 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. 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. What's more, the narrative reasoning behind each quest is questionable. 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. 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. And within those fetch quests are yet more fetch quests. Instead, there are fetch quests: lots of fetch quests.
Riptide's sandbox island of Hanoi isn't filled with the fun zombie-killing adventures you might expect. And that's only if you can muster up enough energy to make it that far.
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. This all makes it so very hard to care about anything that happens in Riptide. Then there's the plot itself, which endlessly meanders between government conspiracy, sci-fi, and human interest, without even the slightest sense of direction. 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. But there's no sense of humour or self-awareness here: to Riptide's detriment, it takes itself very seriously. 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. Now Playing: Dead Island: Riptide Video Review By clicking 'enter', you agree to GameSpot's
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