If you want to do these things, however, you're better off with the first Dead Island, which had a better setting anyway. Smashing zombies heads in can be, while tiring, also pretty fun. Co-op is more fun that single player, even moreso when you have more characters around.

Modding a weapon to provide some sort of elemental damage is fun when you've collected the requisite knickknacks from around the island. There are some enjoyable parts that are worth mentioning. Riptide wisely starts the player at level 15, skipping the fun and moving right to the pain.Īnd so we're caught in an interminable limbo, sprinting past fights to grab McGuffins that will only gain us more hated experience points and force us into interactions with more hordes of zombies that will clamber onto our backs and kill us in a few seconds, respawning us a few hundred meters away and giving us a new opportunity to smack them with a wrench and then die again. In the first game, the relatively enjoyable zombie swatfest of the first few hours soon gave way to the endless march that characterized the rest of the game. The character models don't even change to give you some notion that now you are stronger - just a level 16 zombie instead of a level 17 zombie, and a few more of them. Leveling becomes a punishment rather than a reward, and every time we assign a new skill point we do so with the inevitable knowledge that the game becomes less fun with every experience point we gain.

There's an old RPG trick here- the enemies level up as your character does, neutralizing any idea of character development. Got a boat? It handles like a hippo and basically has a ladder on the side for zombies to climb onboard. Finally smashed your way to the next objective? All the zombies between you and your quest giver have respawned. Found a weapon that you like using? It will degrade constantly, forcing you to organize your entire game around trips to repair benches. Dead Island: Riptide is determined to stymie fun at all opportunities. It looks like that's actually the cover of the game. You hit the zombies with some kind of stick, you do it again, you fall to your knees and sob. There are moments - brief, valuable moments of exploration, discovery and fun, spaced between hours upon hours of smashing through the same zombie horde with the same blunt object to recover some new tan-colored Macguffin and return it to some new desperate survivor in exchange for the same old stick with a new skin.

Dead island riptide weapons list