Dead Island (and, by extension, Riptide) is that game. Something that didnвЂ™t require thinking, that went straight to the lizard brain and delivered the oft-maligned blood and guts Pavlovian stimuli that drove Joseph Lieberman nuts. An open world of opportunity and action, easily digestible in a short, occasional spat of play. From there, itвЂ™s all downhill as nothing but new-to- Riptide enemy Screamers pose much of a threat to the playerвЂ™s swath of destruction.Д®ven through all of its flaws, this is exactly the game I wanted when I first saw Dead Rising in early 2006-a stupid gorefest of a game that only slowed down for perfunctory maintenance. Halfway through the first wave, the strategy fades away as the realization a rage attack can thin the herd faster and more efficiently than any proper tactic.

Almost, as in the tension is palpable the first time setting up fencing and mines and other preparations is undertaken. What Riptide brings new to the table, however, are a handful of tower defense missions that almost work. Even the gameвЂ™s plot parallels the first, with the prerequisite twist being exactly the same. Prior to Henderson, the city that sparks the gameвЂ™s third act, Riptide wanders through the already-familiar rickety city, biological lab, and Japanese war relic tropes set in the first game. Water hazards and lusher jungles aside, Palanai suffers from a feeling of similarity. Sometimes even the weather is buggy, leading to a capricious climate which is sunny at one moment and monsoon rains the next.

Buggy map boundaries with regards to water and fencing donвЂ™t help, as moving over such hazards (instead of around) can sometimes lead to unexpected death. Palanai is waterlogged from massive flooding, making traversing the island difficult at first. Paradise, in this chapter of the Dead Island franchise, is represented by Palanai-a sister island of the originalвЂ™s island of Banoi. While this ignores the existence of cutscenes, dialogue, and other occasions of enemy-free downtime, that well represents the brutal cadence of death as the cast plows through paradise. Checking the stats on my session reveals that I saw an average of three zombie kills per minute. Customized weapons get more and more deadly in their execution, character traits build to bigger and better things, and the vast legion of shambling ghouls starts to fall apart quickly. Rarely does death truly serve as a setback, just pushing players back a few feet with ten percent of their collected money lost.ДЄs a result, survival takes a distant backseat to killing in Riptide. Unlike contemporaries in Left 4 Dead and Dead Rising, Techland elected to minimize the consequences of death and made respawning as painless as possible. None of this should come as a surprise to anyone who has played the initial foray into Dead IslandвЂ™s world, a truly janky game that gained a cult following on the merits of its own stupid fun. C-movie writing and acting, graphics that are good but not great, environmental factors that are nonsensical at best, mission design that blends together into a beige gameplay landscape thatвЂ™s easily ignoredвЂ¦ All of this is forgiven, however, with the sheer capacity of violence available to dispatch the undead. In a playthrough of the game, issues lie within every technical and artistic metric it can be graded against. Therein lie the problem with Dead Island: Riptide. A typical new release will find a niche, a high water mark, something to define it and make it easily palatable for a reviewer.

Coincidentally, those are the same four qualifiers that GamePro laid in stone twenty-four years ago-a magazine most writing about games today read in their formative years. When reviewing a game, thereвЂ™s a certain unspoken undercurrent that forces opinion into four neat subsects: graphics, sound, control, and fun factor.

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