Dead Island Riptide Preview

Dead Island Riptide Preview

Zombies, eh?

The undead certainly have a way of instigating themselves into our subconscious and gaming collective. Whether it's the Walkers on The Walking Dead or the various iterations which find themselves in video games, they're currently popular fodder for the gaming world.

And they're all over the place in the sequel to Dead Island. In Dead Island Riptide, developer Techland's meshed the horror and the survivor genres back together again to produce a bloody mess of a game. Picking up where 2011's Dead Island left off, you find yourself back on the island of Palanai which has been overrun by the undead.

But fortunately along with your other survivors (or solo mode) you're able to negotiate your way through the land, merrily killing everything in your way and trying to do your best to survive.

However, I'm getting a little ahead of myself here.

First up, you get to select your character and choose where you feel their strengths should lie. Adopting a balanced approach, rather than preferring to put all my eggs into one basket, my character was ready to go. And then you're unleashed onto the island.

The preview session I attended was one which had teams of four playing in the co-op mode, so to be honest, you're very reliant on the rest of your gang and how they handle attacks and whether they choose to go for the tried and tested method of simply killing everything in sight or try to achieve some of the tasks necessary to get off the island.

Fortunately with a 3 hour preview window, there was a chance to do a bit of both.

The co-op mode's interesting as you pretty much settle into the mentality of killing as much as you can, whereever you can and with whatever you have to hand. Usually, it's a combo of kicking and punching the undead into one final oblivion but with a stamina bar on screen determining just how much strength you've got to unleash your anger, you have to be a bit calculating with your moves. For example, if you keep kicking rather than let your stamina recover, you will take a lot longer to do any damage whatsoever; whereas if you give yourself time to power up, a couple of kicks and punches will see off the undead. That said, if you're part of a pack of survivors, taking it in turns to dish out the beating will give you all a chance to recover and will easily see off the zombies.

But you also have to work together as a team to achieve goals - be it taking out a massive ogre zombie which vomits all over you, sapping your life (this game doesn't do subtlety) or working together to get the pieces needed for repairing a boat motor so that you can take to the water to escape. There are plenty of quests scattered around the island - from providing pain killers needed for someone ill within the compound or finding and saving other characters, there's certainly a whole heap to do in this open world game rather than just kill. 3 hours wasn't enough time to fully get into the mission of the game, but I suspect that Dead Island Riptide could offer a lot of gaming potential when it comes out a little later this month.

It's not just all about the killing though - you have to repair and upgrade your weapons, which degrade over time (as they're wont to do with so much hacking going on) as well as upgrading your own personal skills from lock picking to crafting weapons. Given that you can pick pocket the dead after they've been thrashed and can trade with co-players, there's certainly a hint that some kind of strategy will need to be in place to survive Palanai rather than just opting for fight or flight. There are also quests, secret files to collect, dead zones to clear and radio tapes which give you info about the outbreak, indicating there's more than enough to offer you different types of games - whether you want to just pick up Dead Island Riptide and go postal for an hour or tap into the survival instinct and longer term game.

As for the zombies - from thugs, walkers to ogres to rabidly fast runners who head towards you, there are varying levels of skill on hand from the undead. Thankfully, though, there are plenty of weapons to help you out - from a meat cleaver which is totally gory in its killing, Freddie Kreuger style finger slashers to a club with nails, there are certainly enough ways on hand to despatch them in bloody fashion. Sadly, though, in the preview I saw, there were a couple of problems with the zombies and the background - predominantly that they'd get stuck under wooden platforms and thrash around as if they weren't there, giving the game a kind of uncomplete feeling in parts and one which may, over time, detract. Add to that, the fact that you can't go thrashing through undergrowth at times meaning your stealth attacks are a bit difficult to achieve and you can see how it's not perfect in places. Then, however, you get moments where you can drive a car or boat into a horde of hungry brain feeders and despatch them with such gore and glee, it becomes addictively compulsive.

But, given that this game appears to be more about the blood and guts side of things with a bit of adventuring thrown in for good measure, I think those niggles will not totally prevent you from gathering a group of mates together and going for a mass killing session. And those are completely fun with weapons removing part of their limbs, giving them a "brain bash" where their heads explode...there's likely to be a lot of bragging about how you killed off the undead rather than which tactics you used to survive.

There are guilty pleasures all over the place in Dead Island Riptide and despite it not being perfect in terms of graphics in places, it's still got plenty of playability and offers a great co-op experience.

Dead Island Riptide hits PC, PS3 and XBox consoles on April 23rd.