Dead Island Riptide

Dead Island Riptide is a first-person zombie action-RPG developed by Techland, set on the flooded island of Palanai in the Banoi archipelago. You play as one of the returning survivors from the first game (Sam B., Xian, Logan, or Purna, each with their own skill trees split across Fury, Combat, and Survival branches) plus one new addition to the roster. The story picks up almost immediately where its predecessor left off: a military ship, a monsoon, and yet another undead catastrophe. If that setup sounds very familiar, that is because this game is, by almost every measure, Dead Island 1.5. The core loop is the same melee-focused grind you know. You find blunt objects, bladed weapons, and improvised tools, craft or purchase modifications at workbenches, and hack your way through charger, spitter, and boomer zombie types alongside new entries like the water-clinging Drowner. Weapon durability is noticeably more forgiving than in the first game, and the leveling pace feels quicker, which makes the early hours genuinely enjoyable. The big structural additions are hub defense missions (barricade a safe house and fight off waves of undead), Dead Zone instanced areas, and motorboat travel through the game's heavily flooded zones. The defense missions in particular do a decent job of giving co-op a reason to exist beyond "more bodies hit harder." On the vehicle side, plowing through zombie clusters in a jeep or cutting across floodwater by boat is legitimately satisfying in short bursts. The guns show up later and are weak enough that you will largely ignore them. Here is where it gets honest. The quest design is genuinely painful. Nearly every mission, main or side, is a fetch chain buried inside another fetch chain. The minimap navigation is unreliable, marker placement is routinely confusing, and the interface feels unchanged from a game that was already criticized for a clunky UI. Bugs and soft locks are reported with uncomfortable regularity. The story adds nothing worth caring about, and the supporting cast has the depth of soggy cardboard. Co-op, however, is where Riptide finds its reason to exist. Up to four players can drop in and out freely, enemies and loot scale individually per player, and the complete lack of meaningful death penalty means you can throw yourselves at horde defense objectives with zero anxiety. The social chaos papers over a lot of the repetition. Solo, though, the same repetition has nowhere to hide, and the game's length works against it hard. If you played the first Dead Island and bounced off its rough edges, Riptide will not change your mind. If you have never played either game and want a breezy co-op zombie session with some light RPG scaffolding, there is a specific kind of low-stakes fun to be found here, provided you set expectations accordingly. Think of it as a very large expansion to a game that was itself imperfect, and you will probably have a reasonable time. Alex, Scout Team