If you choose to play as new character John Morgan (you can also choose from one of the returning cast and/or import your character progress from Dead Island), you can quickly unlock a powerful kick attack that improves the cloying combat no end, and this gives Riptide a real boost. It's not quite up there with Far Cry 3 for views and detailing, but the swamps, floods and landmarks give it character. Striking out on bitty quests from a small holiday village near the coast, you gather items, fight the hordes and try to fashion a new escape plan as you drive, boat and wade your way through the monsoon-soaked jungle and highways and towns beyond. Once you get past a poor prologue on a military ship and find your sea legs (characters in Dead Island move in a shambling gait that takes a little getting used to), you settle into the game's new island setting of Panalai - sister island to the first game's Banoi - and a fairly rewarding rhythm. Initially, the answer seems to be that it looks pretty decent. So what does a Dead Island game look like when its guts aren't hanging out? The horror stories of missing triggers for story events and calamitous glitching and clipping seem to be things of the past.
Restarting it at a generous automatic checkpoint solved the problem. I've experienced a few glitches - sometimes the game switches from blues skies to dark clouds and pouring rain in a split second, and occasionally your zombie enemies exhibit behaviour for which 'brain dead' feels like an unsuitably mild label - but the worst thing that's happened is that I once had to quit the game because of a sudden, inexplicable performance drop.
So, first things first, then: Dead Island Riptide is a much more polished game. The developers belatedly patched in some dignity, and sales were tremendous thanks to canny marketing, but a lot of us felt burned by the experience. Techland's first stab at an open-world survival RPG - where players joined with friends or fought alone through a holiday island overrun by zombies - was light on smarts and heavy on smacking things with a modified shovel, but its biggest problem was the bugs and glitches that killed your enthusiasm more effectively than the undead.
That wasn't always the case with Dead Island, though. When it comes to the end of the world, it's the boring stuff that really kills you. The thing that gets you killed in a zombie apocalypse isn't holding them off while someone you love sprints for the chopper - it's losing your footing on a walkway or rooftop, or getting slashed to death while you're doing a three-point turn in a boat. You know what kills you in a zombie apocalypse? We all like to imagine it's the blaze of glory at the end of a hard day's survival - gravely wounded, sacrificing ourselves to trigger the explosion that lets our friends live to fight another day.
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