It all begins on a ship after you escaped from Banoi and something happens unexpectedly on the ship. Somehow which I never understood was the ship got the infection and I don’t know how since they were in the middle of the ocean. Maybe they were testing the infection and it got out of hand. Who knows but during this time there is a monsoon happening which causes the whole ship to crash on an island called Palanai and coincidently this island has the infection too. You arrive on the beach where you will meet a survivor and have finish the tutorial where you go to a camp and kill the zombies and defend the camp from the horde. You eventually get told that the island is getting nuked so after this point you have to find a way off of the island. To go through this island you can choose five different paths with each of them having different abilities like one is better with guns, the other is better with blunt weapons, and etc. The beginning of the game is ok but nothing great. I expected it to be better than it was but it was good that it continued where it left off. 

Playing with a friend makes this game more fun but playing by yourself is really not that fun at all. Just play with a friend and not a random because it usually isn’t that fun due to problems like your partner doesn’t work like a teammate and steals everything or makes you do everything as he does nothing and etc. The game’s length not too long and not too short and it depends on the thing you do like if you are just going to blast through the story it will be very short or are you going to find all the collectibles and quests and explore which will make it longer. The length will vary for everyone because each person is different. There are the people that rush through the game and then there is the people that take their time so I put it at decent length because it is in middle of long and short. You will meet several people in the storyline which some of them add to the story while others are boring and add little to nothing. The game is replayable if you play with a friend but by yourself I don’t think it is worth the second playthrough sadly, unless you are aiming for the platinum trophy/every achievement than it is something to aim for. This game also has new game+ which is good because you are able to keep all your items, money, level, and anything else that you may have found like guide book pages, volunteer’s voice recordings, secret files, and blueprints which you could find anything that you may have missed.

The ending to me was quite disappointing. I don’t know why but it was. Probably because it sequel baited or it was too obvious what was going to happen. To me it didn’t feel completed and felt a bit rushed. It was not an ending that felt worth the time to go through the game and it was way too easy to finish as there is no difficulty level changer. Which is a bummer because I like going through the story on easy and then ramp up the difficulty level to make it tougher to beat which is a bummer to someone that wants a challenge.

Overall it was good but the ending needed to be better.

The gameplay is pretty good as the controls are easy to understand so you should be able to pick up this game and able to play it in no time especially if you played the first one. The other things that make the gameplay better is the hours you can put into this game especially if you play with friends. I put in 46 hours without even knowing it but most of that time was me playing with a friend but if you played it alone you may not be interested to put in that many hours but it depends on the individual mainly. Some may not want to play it that long but others may put in that much. Regardless of the individual, you can’t deny the game has lots of hours of gameplay. Let’s continue on to quests as this adds to the time you play this game. Getting quest requires you to look around the island to find. There is save (person name here) quest, there is fetch and continuous quests, team quests, and other types of quests which has a good variety of them. I like that they aren’t to repetitive. The quests doesn’t really need to be done at all since they have no effect on the story but it is good if you want to slow down going through the story though. There tons of collectibles to find and it will take a very long time to find them all and this just adds to the game. You can find guide book pages, voice recordings, and secret files but you don’t need any of them but if you want more game time you could try to find them. Trading items with friends is good because they might have multiple of the same item that you need and you can’t find them so you can give him what he needs to get the item that you need or you could just help a friend in need and give him something that could help him through the game without asking for anything in return. Trading is a great thing to help others and help yourself. Now that we got through all the good things it is time for the bad things. The thing I hate the most is that you die way to fast. I remember walking through an area killing zombies and I had a full health bar and it only took them three hits to kill you. In one second you are alive and killing zombies the next second you could be dead. To me that is way too easy to die. I think they should have made the zombies harder to kill you but that may be just me but I didn’t like that. Your stamina runs out to fast, you can swing a bat six times and you will be drained out which I don’t think a bat is that heavy to cost that much stamina. I think it would take 12-15 swings before your stamina runs out because bats are not that heavy to swing. I can understand with a sledgehammer because that thing is heavy but bats are not. They needed more of balance for the stamina usage and how much zombies hurt you. Zombies can spawn behind you which are annoying. You can clear a spot and a zombie can spawn behind you and kill you because you would think no one would be behind you since you killed them all. It doesn’t happen all the time but it is just bad programming and it needs to be fixed. There is one other bad thing and that is you can’t manually save. Let’s say for example say you got pretty far but you never hit a checkpoint for it to autosave and you want it to save but can’t so you go find a checkpoint and then the power goes out and when the power comes back on, all the progress that you made before you could save gets wiped out and you will have to do that all over again, how will you feel? Probably angry and that is a problem of having it not able to save it manually. 

Overall the gameplay is good but needed a bit of work for it to be better.

The Music is good but could have been better. The menu music is slightly better the in game music because it added more atmosphere to the game but the in game music is still good. The menu layout is simple and easy to navigate and the menu background is good. The gun design/sounds are ok but not the best. This is more of a blunt/hand/melee weapon type of game than a shooter so I can see why they put little detail into the guns but it is fine as is. Now onto the bad stuff of the game, it has frame rate issues. When you move around or turn around quickly I could see the framerate drop. Everything looks like a blur when you turn around quickly. There are sound glitches and what I mean is when a song is playing it would cut 2 seconds of it and it can affect anything in the game and not just the music. It may be a couple of seconds but it shouldn’t cut out anything. There are glitches in the game like when you charge a zombie and when you miss you can arrive 20 meters away from the zombie you were trying to charge or float in midair when you come across rocks and others and this may not be game breaking but it is a problem one random glitch can freeze your system. The game can freeze the system other than a glitch like when you play with a friend. One little internet bump can freeze up the system and it happened when I was playing with a friend. There I was playing with a friend his internet had a small bump and he got disconnected and when he got back he said it froze his system. This is a rare occasion though. The lip syncing in this game is bad. When they talk it looks like the words come out faster than they open their mouths and this may not be a problem at all to others but it is because it shows that the developer never tested the game which is why it has glitches and other problems. The animations are also bad in this game. The arm movements’ looks like it was still in alpha stage and didn’t get through that stage and this probably wouldn’t be a problem if they tested it. There is one other problem and that is the load times. It takes 20 seconds plus to load the next area and to me that is a bit annoying. It probably is just me that is annoyed by this.

Overall this game needed more polish than it got. The island layout was good but was infested with not just zombies but with bugs. 

This game has a good amount of weapons to choose from but it did need more though but it is fine the amount there is now. Like any adventure game should have is exploring and this game has that as there is two islands to explore and practically felt like Far Cry 3 with zombies instead of people. There is a lot of exploring especially if you want to find the collectibles and blueprints in this game. The weapons in this game wear out and you would need to find repair stations to fix them which felt kind of real because weapons do wear out but the only thing I hate is that repair benches need money to repair your weapons which is wrong because you are doing it yourself so why does a repair bench need money? I think this part is dumb and I would understand the price tag if one of the NPC’s were doing it but that is not the case here. You can also make weapons if you found a blueprint to the weapon that you want to make but to make weapons is again to pay the repair bench money even though you are putting it together. This game has a good amount of action by killing a bunch of zombies and certain parts is a gun battle and a lot of quests to find and kill zombies so there is a good amount of the action even though it is not all guns blazing it still have action. The one other problem I have is certain weapons require high levels but they are garbage. When I see a high leveled weapon I expect it to be good and not bad. I think they should have made it that the high level you are the better weapons you get and make the zombies a little tougher each time but each weapon feels like garbage no matter the level. Something that made it worthy of leveling up but it never felt worthy at all.

Overall they did good job with this genre but needed to be slightly better than it was. 

Conclusion:
The overall game is good but needed a lot more work than they put into it. I can see this IP grow if Techland plays their card right but as for now it is not as good as it can be and is worth a rent. 

Another good review. I really love your editing skills with the pictures.

Sadly ill be passing up on this game.  I think the games has potential but they ultimately fail overall

is this better than the first one?

I hope somebody here knows the answer to the question because i surely don't. I never played the first one myself

Edit: I do know that my friend did say that the first one was better

Woo, nice job on the layout.

Sounds like an average-ish game unless you play co-op, which I don't. Also heard some noise about bugs, which this review seems to confirm. Hopefully they'll make some improvements in future installments.

Solid review.

Two reviews in a week. Good job man. It is not my kind of game but it was surprising to see how well the first one sold. Certainly good for people who play together and want a distraction from Left4Dead.

I haven't played Riptide but I didn't like the 1st one.  

Dead island is the only game I stopped playing cause I got bored, I probably won't play riptide but good job on the review