When I reviewed Dead Rising 2 : Off the Record not too long ago, I questioned which part of me felt like it was a good idea to go straight back in and play a game that felt exactly like the previous one I'd just played, and upon completing Dead Island : Riptide, successor to the Playstation 3 title, Dead Island, I'm here asking myself the same question again.
In defence of Dead Rising 2 : Off the Record, it didn't ever claim to be a true sequel, hence the remaining use of the number "2" with an extended tagline in the title, rather than actually calling itself Dead Rising 3. It was the same game with an alternative plot that ran in parallel to Dead Rising 2, so it at least made sense.
Despite being taglined, rather than numbered, Dead Island : Riptide is a direct plot continuation of the ending of Dead Island, which is good enough reason to consider it a sequel in my eyes. However, Dead Island 2 would subsequently be announced for the pipeline at a later date anyway, so who knows what the rules are?
My main point is, Dead Island : Riptide, doesn't feel like a sequel. It doesn't feel like a new game with fresh ideas or differences. If I began to list the changes that I felt were worth mentioning, I wouldn't even fill out this paragraph. Is that a criticism? Probably. I just felt like I was playing through Dead Island all over again though.
The combat is exactly the same melee-heavy, dull, clunky attack system present in Dead Island. Swinging and missing with no rhyme or reason is frustrating and the stamina system sucks the fun out of combat because once you get into the rare occasion of hacking zombies down with consistency and not being stifled by the inaccuracies of the combat system, you'll be forced to take a break for a few moments whilst your stamina bar regenerates itself anyway.
Quests are just a seemingly never-ending loop of fetch tasks, exploiting a painfully obvious lack of creativity, character dialogue is still delivered with a severe lack of quality and the "story" is garbage. The game is better in co-op, which you'll need to do as per the requirements of the trophy list, but the biggest gripes with this game will still exist - you'll just have a few people to discuss how bad they are with, as opposed to just telling yourself in your head.
Regardless, Dead Island : Riptide begins at the end of Dead Island, where your safe evacuation off the island of Banoi is promptly interrupted by an attempted arrest by Australian police forces on the getaway ship. After being sedated, you're awoken to the ship being run amock and all hell breaking loose, an outbreak presumably started by one of the survivors visibly biting a soldier during the arrest cutscene. The ship ends up washed ashore on the island of Palanai after crashing into a rock amidst the chaos, where the infection from Banoi island has already apparently spread into. All of a sudden, we're back at square one where you're taken on a journey to find your way off the island of Palanai.
The trophy list is medium in size, coming in at a reduced volume of 36 trophies, including the Platinum, down 13 trophies from Dead Island's 49. I think it's a slightly less creative list on the whole, with a touch of crossover to the original, but with a bigger emphasis on story progression, and lower emphasis on the Co-op elements of the game.
Across the game's roughly 6-8 hour Story, there are 11 trophies awarded for simply progressing through to the end of the main story arc and completing the main game. This equates to almost a third of the entire list - A big change in direction from Dead Island, whose progression trophies only went as far as beating specific acts within the game.
There isn't any requirement to play through the game on a specific difficulty level, and you're also given the option to import your character across, which will allow you to start from whichever level you reached at the end of your time with Dead Island - A Level 50 Sam B in my case. This turns out to be an extremely useful headstart for a returning trophy.
The "Obtain Level 70" trophy, awarded for Obtaining level 70, requires the player to amass a gargantuan 23,396,500 experience points. The import character option does make an instant dent in this, which is where the feature comes in most useful. However, this will only get you so far, and you'll need to rely on other methods to achieve this trophy.
You'll earn experience points for fairly standard actions, including completing quests, defeating enemies and completing in-game challenges, but the total amount of experience required for this trophy means you're just not going to get through all this in a single playthrough of the game, even if you choose to import a fairly high level character like I did. Amongst the variation of quests you can complete, there are a series of ongoing side quests where you have to retrieve specific items for certain characters, of which you can infinitely turn these items in, in exchange for experience points.
These quests allow you to take advantage of a duplication glitch, whereby you can drop a series of items on the floor, kill yourself and before you load back into your last checkpoint, you can interrupt the process and reload in manually. This action will restore your inventory to it's previous state, but more importantly, allows you to still pick up the items you previously dropped. Rinse and repeat this process for the relevant item to turn as many in for quest experience as you need to. It's a great tactic that will spare you a full second playthrough of the game, which is something I really didn't want to have to do - This game was barely worth 30 hours of my time, let alone 60. Once I'd beaten everything the trophy list had required of me, I was still only level 62, and even though duplicating these items on repeat was a chore in itself, it was a much better alternative than facing the prospect of a second playthrough.
The "Dream Team" trophy, awarded for Completing all the main quests co-operatively with any number of partners, ensures the co-op element of this game becomes a mandatory part of the trophy list, and you'll need to beat all 28 main story quests with at least one other person.
There is some generous flexibility here. You don't need to use the same partner(s) throughout, it doesn't matter who the game host is, which allows you to freely jump into other players sessions if you find it difficult to get people to join yours, and the quests don't need to be completed in sequential order, which is handy for instances where the only players available are those at different chapters to you.
I had already completed 22/28 quests with a previous mate I originally played this game with, but it was tough to find other players at this point in the games cycle, and I had to accept in a few instances that I would have to jump backwards and beat some quests I'd already beaten to assist somebody else in reaching the same point in the story as me and continuing on through there, which meant a little bit of re-treading old ground on a couple of occasions, but something I had to resort to due to the baron nature of co-operative availability.
I also can't confirm this for sure, but it seems as though joining someone else's session whilst they're part way through a quest doesn't count for trophy progress either. I think you need multiple players present at the beginning of the quest for progress to count, which is a bit frustrating because the only way to make sure this doesn't occur is to have full control of the game as session host - However, it is easier to join onto other players and there's a strong chance they'll already be part way through a mission when you join them. In most of these challenging scenarios, it's just easier to set yourself back and play-through to the point you were at yourself and help somebody else progress.
Finally, the "Hoarder" trophy, awarded for Finding all collectibles, requires you to collect all 61 different items scattered throughout the game.
As far as collectibles go, this isn't actually one of the worst collectible journeys out there, however, it is prone to being glitched, whereby you'll finish on 60/61 collectibles and the game won't recognise that you have picked one of them up. This happened to me and cost me an extra 2-3 hours of gametime to figure out which collectible I was missing - An apt way to finish off an experience that was generally fairly underwhelming.
The most effective way to solve it is to start a New Game+ with a new character and choose to load in at Chapter 12, which will open up the entire map, but respawn everything, including the collectibles. The rest is just a trial and error task of re-collecting them until the solitary collectible you were missing pops the trophy. I already had the individual trophies for collecting all voice recordings and secret files, so I figured those weren't the issue, which narrowed the field slightly, but it was still a postcard that I was missing, and typically, was one of the last few remaining items I had to collect to trigger the trophy.
I managed to earn the Platinum trophy in just under 32 hours. This included a fully complete 29 hour save file, and an extra 2 and a half hours for a new game purely to go through the collectibles for the sole remaining glitched trophy.
The story is very short, clocking in at roughly 6-8 hours, and everything else fits around this as you go through the game. The majority of the rest of your time will be spent completing every single quest in the game for the "Achiever" trophy, which totals to 80, including the 28 main story quests. If you manage to make sure your intent is to play-through this game in Co-op from the very beginning, you'll avoid having to go through the story twice, providing that you also take advantage of the duplication glitch explained above in order to make sure you can reach level 70 in the same playthrough, and further negate the necessity to have to start a new game purely for the purpose of levelling up.
The game itself seldom poses a challenge, and the only consequences of death are losing a bit of money and restarting at a checkpoint that's never really any further than a few steps back from where you died. There are no difficulty sensitive trophies either, leaving you to play the game to whatever leisurely extent you wish.
Notable Trophies -
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| Obtain Level 70 - Obtain Level 70 Dream Team - Complete all the main questions cooperatively with any number of partners The Hoarder - Find all collectibles |
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