Dead Island Riptide PC Review

By- John Williamson

Techland’s first attempt at the survival horror genre received a divisive reception. The original Dead Island featured one of the finest trailers in recent years, outlining the tragedy of a quintessential family destroyed by the zombie apocalypse.  The release version, failed to deliver any sense of emotional connection to relatable and likeable characters.  It resulted in a fun but sterile experience, known more for it’s horrendous port than a powerful story.  Can the latest iteration, add a fresh approach to this vastly overdone market?

Dead Island Riptide continues the plot from its predecessor.  After surviving the events of Banoi, you board a helicopter seeking travel to a safe-zone.  Here you embark onto a Naval vessel crawling with armed soldiers. Unexpectedly for the main protagonists, they receive a hostile reception and drugged for further investigation into their immunity of the zombie virus.  Here you are introduced to the new character, John Morgan, a former soldier in the Australian Defence Force who was instructed to carry out an order against those dearest to him.

Morgan was the only individual to refuse and was ostracized from the platoon.  As the events unfold, and we learn he isn’t susceptible to the zombie infection, the Navy vessel ends up derailed on the remote island of Palanai. While I did find these early moments engaging, the entire story seems to be cobbled together and uninspiring.  The voice acting is at times cringeworthy, with an overuse of the word, “bloody” to almost remind you using accent stereotypes that the characters are Australian.   In the game’s defence, most users will be attracted to Dead Island Riptide on the basis of it’s Co-Op fun factor, rather than it’s plot.

 When the game first commences, you are given the option to play with one of 5 character choices, John Morgan, Logan, Sam B, Purna and Xian Mei. Each of these have different specialties from melee to gun combat.  Upon selection, a synopsis of their history is played which is a nice touch to give some perspective to newcomers of the series.  You start automatically at level 15, and select predefined skills sets such as combat, survival and balanced priorities.  It is even possible to import your levelled up player from the original game.  This is an admirable nod to devoted fans who invested a lot of time in the previous title.  The only feature I would have liked to be implemented, is the ability to create your own character from scratch.

A conventional scheme is used to level up your character via skill trees with experience points gained throughout various quests.  Abilities can be enhanced in 3 areas, fury, combat and survival which provide perks such as greater stamina and heightened weapon proficiencies.  One notable feature, is the challenges incentive offering huge XP boosts for slaughtering a number of enemies in a certain way.  For instance, 5000XP is rewarded for completing the “Capital Punishment” task, which involves killing 50 enemies by cutting off their heads.  Interestingly, your experience level is matched by the opponent AI ensuring you are never overpowered and fighting enemies is always a challenge.  The core gameplay is on the whole thoroughly enjoyable providing you play in short bursts of up to 3-4 hours.  Whilst combat can quickly become repetitive, eliminating hordes of enemies is fairly enjoyable.  To my surprise, the game was even enjoyable in solo play when tackling a chapter at a time. However, as the game is built from the co-op perspective, it’s easy to become surrounded on both flanks from vast numbers of zombies.

An energy meter determines your ability to combat enemies, deteriorating as you apply defensive and offensive tactics.  This ensures that you dodge the approaching AI and perform counter-attacks rather than simply button bashing.  The weapons you scavenge are also pretty rudimentary and degrade if overused.  This enhances the survival feel of the game, as each strike has to be maximized to create as much damage as possible to target areas. This feature did exist in the original game, but it tends to behave in a more balanced and fair manner.  One huge infuriating design choice, is the use of quicktime events in the combat system.  On foot, zombies have the ability to knock you down far too often, which engages the same QTE where you have to click the left mouse button, then the right mouse button to push them to the ground.  This same concept is even applied when enemies board onto your boat.

Throughout Dead Island Riptide, there are three major enemy types: exploding Suiciders, Floaters which produce a corrosive slime, and charging Rams.  It’s impressive to see some enemy variety which require different tactics.  For example, Floaters need to be approached with caution avoiding the slime with cover behind trees, and attacking it’s limbs.  In contrast to this, the Suiciders are best tackled with a quick attack, retreating before they explode and decimate the surrounding area.   This is an adept strategy when attempting to fend off a large concentration of zombies.

There are a number of minor annoyances which affect the level of immersion throughout the story and make the game feel unpolished.  One instance of this, is the constant respawning of items you have already plundered.  A lot of time is spent amassing money and accumulating items which can be used to craft weapons.  This almost seems like a wasted exercise when everything reappears and devalues the items which you have collected.  Another problem is the ability to only open vehicles on the driver’s side door.  While this may seem such a petty criticism, on at least 10 occasions I had to slowly walk around the boot of the truck just to enter.  Frustrating moments such as these, discourage you from exploring the world of Palanai.

The original Dead Island suffered from a notoriously incompetent PC version, and Riptide has done little, if anything to remedy this.  When I first booted up the game, despite being in full screen mode, I was informed that it was running in windowed mode and unable to adjust any gamma settings.  After this, to progress into the main menu you are requested to press any key, which to my amazement doesn’t register any keystrokes at all.  There are two ways to repair this bug, one is to ALT+TAB in and out of the menu, and the other is to hit ALT+ENTER.  Graphically, the game is devoid of any notable options, and lacks any form of Anti-Aliasing or Anisotropic Filtering.  The reported maximum refresh rate is 60Hz and cannot be changed, but despite this I easily attained over 200 fps on my monitor.  Speaking of frame rates, where do i even start? VSync is flat out broken, and causes micro-stuttering.  MSI Afterburner recorded a constant 60 fps, with only 28-38% GPU usage with VSync enabled but actually felt like 10-15 fps.  Disabling this option, resulted in a 200-220 fps with a 96-99% GPU Utilization. As a result, the game is unplayable without experiencing huge screen tearing.

Even without VSync, there are huge frame dips and evidence of poor optimization.  One instance of this was during a level where the player is required to carry a boat engine, picking this up would reduce the framerate from 220 to 20.  Possibly the most glaring omission is a lack of F.O.V slider.  The default field of view is set to an embarrassing low 62.5, which caused severe eye fatigue during the review.  This led to a significant amount of motion sickness and I had to take breaks after 30 minutes.  This can be altered manually with a modification of the configuration files but negatively affects the gun physics.  For those desperate to change the default F.O.V, you need to follow these steps outlined by the excellent folks at PC Gaming Wiki.

1. Go to C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\diriptideDI\
2. Open Data0.pak in Winrar or Winzip.
3. In another Explorer window, go to Documents or My Documents (depending on Windows version). Go to Riptide and create folder “data”. Enter data and create a folder “skills”.
4. In Winrar/zip, go to skills inside the Data0.cab and drag & drop default_levels.xml into that DocumentsRiptidedataskills folder.
5. Open the .xml in notepad.
6. Edit FOV to whatever you want. Save.

I would also highly recommend downloading the Dead Island Helper which contains numerous tweaks including AA options and improving overall performance.  The PC port of Dead Island Riptide is so disastrous I had to re-download and install the first game to double check that the sequel wasn’t as bad as the original, and it was a pretty close call.  Overall, this shoddy and lazy port shows no respect to the PC market and is not fit for purpose.

Conclusion – Is It Worth Your Money?

Dead Island Riptide is a fun game in short bursts before the repetition kicks in.  While there are some admirable inclusions such as the challenges system, it’s difficult to overlook that this is one of the most unimaginative and unashamedly rehashed games in recent years.  To be frank, it looks identical to the original, and the only new feature is the inclusion of boats, which gets old pretty quickly. Coupled with the fact that the PC version is an utter mess, you would be much better off purchasing the original Dead Island, as you won’t be missing out on much.