When you see one, you get neurotic and imagine hundreds more lurking out of sight, ready to ruin your game.įor the rest of my "Riptide" playthrough following the invisible-boat episode, nagging doubts about the game's creators burbled to the surfaceĮvery time I was tasked with searching an area for an item and did not immediately find it.UPDATE: Timo Ullmann, managing director of Yager Development, has said that the company's departure from Dead Island 2 was down to a difference in vision. The trouble with video game bugs is that they're like bugs in your home. But the point remains: If I hadn't felt obligated to soldier through the hunt for the invisible boat so that I could finish the game and write this review, I probably would have put down "Riptide" and never returned. I was able to walk to an adjacent area and grab a perfectly functional boat from a marina. Luckily, I did not have to start the game over.
#DEAD ISLAND 2 RIPTIDE TRIAL#
After 10 minutes of trial and error, I was able to place the engine into the invisible boat, at which point, all signs of the boat and the engine vanished.
#DEAD ISLAND 2 RIPTIDE INSTALL#
When I returned, though, the icon representing the part of the invisible boat onto which I was supposed to install the engine was moving all over the screen. With visions of my character skimming across the water in a sitting position, like Wonder Woman in her invisible jet, I went off and found the boat's engine. That's right, I spent close to an hour searching for an invisible boat. When I pressed "X," my character commented that she'd found the boat, but that it needed an engine.
Eventually, I discovered that when I stood in one specific spot on one specific pier looking out into the water, a button prompt appeared. I spent about 45 minutes carefully canvassing the green area highlighted on my mini-map, looking for any kind of boat, but nothing turned up. I encountered one such issue early in the game, when I was tasked with finding a boat to advance the plot line. One of "Riptide's" new features, boats used to navigate the island's numerous lagoons, is a great idea, but it's beset by technical issues. (I'll confess to using one that someone dropped in my game to power through the "Riptide's" back stretch.) Before the game even launched, players online were using ridiculous, overpowered machine guns they'd hacked the game to get. Like the first "Dead Island," "Riptide" is also a glitchy mess. Instead, the game aims for a desperate, even poignant emotional tone it's incapable of hitting. Sadly, though, "Riptide" has little of "Borderlands'" oddball humor or over-the-top goofiness. Structurewise, "Riptide" feels a lot like Gearbox's "Borderlands" games, with quest givers and loot sprinkled liberally throughout the game world. It's too bad the rest of the experience feels so lifeless. From a programming standpoint, it can feel clunky, but the inelegant, imprecise hand-to-hand battles actually compensate for your foes' brain-dead tactics, achieving a sort of perfectly balanced zen of incompetence.
#DEAD ISLAND 2 RIPTIDE PLUS#
As you go, you'll customize your character's abilities, plus make upgrades to weapons and craft improvised equipment at various work benches.Īt its best, the combat in "Dead Island: Riptide" is visceral and tense. With "Riptide," which takes the characters from the first game and drops them onto a different, zombie-infested island with one new companion, Techland has created a lifeless, shambling remix of the original "Dead Island." Rather than improve upon what worked in "Dead Island," the studio has apparently spent the past year and a half taking the meat of the first game, porting it over to a new, similar setting and grafting on a handful of new features, at least one of which feels half-broken.Īs in "Dead Island," you roam across a large, tropical paradise, fighting off undead as you learn about the origins of the plague, look for a way off the island and fulfill requests from various non-player characters. The $50 "Riptide," priced and marketed as something more than an expansion pack and something less than a true "Dead Island 2," is a frustrating mess. Well, the next "Dead Island" is here, sort of, in the form of "Dead Island: Riptide," and it isn't any better. "Dead Island" was a decent co-op game and surely, the thinking went, the next one would be better. Open-world games are tough to make, and the intense combat against varied hordes of zombie "undead" made the game feel like a synthesis of two more successful titles, Valve Software's "Left 4 Dead" and Gearbox Software's "Borderlands." Despite a slew of faults, it was an ambitious game with a massive world for players to roam and was unlike much else on the market. Back in 2011, reviewers including me gave Techland's "Dead Island" something of a pass.