Looking at: The Dead Island games

http://i.ytimg.com/vi/lZqrG1bdGtg/hqdefault.jpg

Slumped Over

Don't loose your head over these games.

The Dead Island games are not good games. They're buggy as hell, barely functional, fail to deliver on most of their promises, and despite their focus on melee combat, the actual combat is floaty and awkward. So why is it that I've put dozens of hours into these games?

I equate the Dead Island games (Dead Island and it's sequel Riptide) to movies from the 80's. Films like The Miami Connection, Road House, or Conan the Barbarian. It's the combination of enthusiasm, mixed with complete nonsensical incompetence that creates this special, almost enduring to-dumb-to-exist product. Dead Island is a game that's fun to play because of how bad it is. It's a game you play with your friends, just to laugh at how awful it really is. Dead Island isn't Plan 9 from Outer Space, but it's damn close.

The Trouble with Trailers

The only reason anyone knows about Dead Island, and the only reason people pre-ordered the original is because of this trailer:

It's a powerful trailer, well edited and emotional. People bought into the hype hard core and expected great things from Dead Island. Never mind the list of promised features:

* Open world filled with zombies

* Hard hitting melee combat with improvised weapons

* Tonnes of insane weapon mods like flaming swords, and electric sledgehammers

* Diablo-like loot system

* Online co-op with up to four people

* Thrilling firefights with human enemies

* An emotional rollercoaster through a zombie apocolypse

Surely this game was going to be the best. This was 2011, zombie games had already stagnated and this was going to be the swan song of an entire sub-genre. This would be the game to make killing zombies awesome again. 

When your not curb stomping zombies, the games can look quite nice, from a distance.

Kicking corpses

The human character models, creepier then any zombie.

Dead Island finally released right before Halloween, 2011. If the trailer above was the treat, the actual game felt like a trick. Here's how everything stacked up:

* Open world filled with zombies - Yeah no. There is an open world, for the first 1.5 acts of the game. After that your stuck in cramped sewers, linear jungles, and a prison. 

* Hard hitting melee combat with improvised weapons - The melee combat is floaty, and it's hard to tell when hits connect. Worse, it's really hard to aim, and the desired headshots can be impossible to pull off. 

* Tonnes of insane weapon mods like flaming swords, and electric sledgehammers - There are weapon mods, but there are only, maybe five or six of them and they just repeat ad-initium. 

* Diablo-like loot system - Hardly. There are, confusingly, chest scattered around the world, but enemies rarely drop weapons, and the best loot is usually bought. 

* Online co-op with up to four people - The one thing that works properly. 

* Thrilling firefights with human enemies - The human enemies are, confusingly, worse then the zombies. They never react properly and don't seem to know how to exist. 

* An emotional rollercoaster through a zombie apocolypse - HA HA HA HA HA HA HA

To say the least, Dead Island failed to live up to expectations. Thanks to it I, and a lot of other people, no longer trust trailers. 

But it isn't necessarily a completely bad game. Dead Island does get a lot of points for originality, even if it's "original" ideas are just mashing together already existing ideas. It was a new type of game, and even better, a new IP. It was functional, especially after some patches, and the first few hours were legitimately fun to play. With a few friends it became an engine for laughs, mostly aimed at the games faults, and there's no denying the cathartic joy of smashing in a zombie's skull with a sledgehammer. Dead Island is almost enduring in how stupid it is, kind of like that kid from grade school that ate paste and sucked at math, but everyone still kind of liked him. 

Sucked up by the Riptide

Weapons, even guns, can have elemental damage added. Squeal with delight as the zombie dances.

Inevitably, Dead Island somehow spawned a sequel. Actually, to be fair, Dead Island has somehow spawned an entire franchise, complete with a competing knockoff made by the scorned original dev team. There's Dead Island, the expansion pack Riptide, a MOBA in the form of Epidemic, a god-awful adventure game Escape Dead Island, and now a proper sequel Dead Island 2 later in 2015. There's even a comic book about the game, a movie is in the works, and a novelization of the games events is planned too. Impressive from a game this mediocre. 

Anyway, I'm here to talk about Riptide, the standalone expansion pack, side-quel to Dead Island. Riptide is a game that does everything a sequel shouldn't. Let's start at the beginning, or more correctly, the before the beginning with Riptide's attempt at marketing:

http://static.giantbomb.com/uploads/original/9/93998/2414170-riptide_se_torso.jpg

A bloody, bikini wearing, torso. Someone, somewhere, thought this was an appropriate way to market a game. I'm not going to delve into women and gaming, I simply haven't the time, but regardless of where you stand on that, this is pretty disgusting. Worse, it's just confusing, and I honestly don't know who, outside of snuff-film enthusiasts, would want something like this. The statue offer was pulled pretty quickly, but this was to be somewhat telling of the final game. 

Indeed, Riptide is a bikini wearing torso of a game. Hold on, let me explain that incredibly bizzare metaphor. Riptide is an attempt to be the best parts of Dead Island. There's more weapons, the world is actually open, there are far less human enemies, and questing is better handled. But it's still missing some key parts and worse doesn't even fix most of the issues from the first game. 

I will say this, in Riptides defense they didn't even try to be serious with the plot. It's pure, uncut 1980's schlocky B-movie nonsense, complete with evil scientists and world domination plans. It's almost to dumb to believe, and that really helps since you probably won't pay much attention anyway. 

Technically speaking, Riptide is the better game, only because of the few improvements it makes on the original. Most improved is that, as I said, the world is actually open this time and your rarely shoved into a cramped space. Even when you do have to descend through sewers it's much better handled and actually stands out as one of my favorite parts of the game. Grab some friends, pick this up on sale, and have a few laughs. 

Every once and a while Dead Island manages a moment of actual terror. These are few and far between.

Still breathing

Characters have "Rage Mode" that will highlight enemies and make you unstoppable killing machines.

Like I said, somehow the Dead Island franchise is far from ... well dead. Dead Island 2 is due out later this year, and Dying Light, made by the original devs of Dead Island just came out (expect a review of that soon). 

I've played a little bit of Dead Island Epidemic and didn't like it very much. It's a Free-2-Play MOBA like DOTA 2 or League of Legends, and I just don't really enjoy that type of game. More over, it just wasn't really that fun. 

Dead Island is a weird specimen, a series running purely on what I can only imagine a cocaine filled high. They're terrible games that barely work. But they're incredible stupidity is probably what helps and they're worth playing anyway, if only to witness how dumb they really are.