The game starts on a military ship and subsequently the survivors go inland to continue their quest to survive the zombie outbreak. The game can be played solo or online with other players. It's a carbon copy of Dead Island with almost no recognizable difference from the first installment.

Combat focuses on melee-based weapons primarily however riptide does feature more frequent use of ranged weapons. The missions are either fetch quests, objective-based, horde defense, or supply runs for the most part. Combat is managed by the stamina gauge and you've got to balance that to ensure you don't burn out and get surrounded by the infected. Weapons can be repaired or altered at workbenches and to do this you have to loot the environments for supplies health items or new weapons.

You level up over time and gain new skills via a tree of varying abilities and perks. The game world is very familiar and honestly, Riptide feels more like a DLC extension than a standalone game. You can explore on foot or use vehicles and it's pretty fun to explore scavenged loo and clear zombie-infested zones but everything feels very familiar from the environments, the weapons, enemies, even the survivors.

It's just a rehash using the existing content from dead island one and ultimately it is a little bit disappointing. The story is pretty thin and undercooked and overall the adventure just isn't up to the high standard of the previous installment but again playing online co-op is where the game is probably at its best and in that mode, you won't really care about the repetition as that is always good fun.

Graphically, the environments look nice but they haven't really pushed forward or substantially improved the visuals. Saying that it's a beautiful location but it does have some technical issues from time to time. The sound has some problems with the ambient effects glitches here and there also voices being synced to characters but you know the music's okay I wouldn't say the audio is a sensational part of the experience though.

The melee zombie combat is as fun as ever the environments are easy on the eye and online co-op is excellent fun. It doesn't add anything substantially new to the franchise it feels like a DLC and most of the content is reused or rehashed to squeeze some more cash out of the franchise okay.

Final Thoughts

This game is a solid continuation of the Dead Island story but does nothing to remedy the shortcomings of the original. It feels like a missed opportunity where the developers could have revamped the whole game structure and innovated but instead they just took the safe option of wheeling out another poorly thought-out sequel that should have been a DLC as opposed to a standalone release. You know i liked the original I loved the original I thought the first Dead Island was fantastic so when this came out at the time I was really excited and initially, I thought oh this is quite good the more I played it the more I realized actually this is really kind of lame they should have done much better with this but you know if you want more of the same this is more of the same.