Dead Island Riptide Preview

VG247 is offering an interview/preview article centered around Techland’s Dead Island Riptide, and focusing in particular about the importance of co-op in the game’s success. Here’s a snip:

(When we looked at the feedback we were getting from players of the first Dead Island it came back time and time again to the enjoyment of the heavy action and hectic moments,) reveals Deep Silver creative producer, Anthony Cardahi. (This is where we see our strengths and what we’ve focused on going into Riptide.

(We touch on survival elements, but not to the extent of a DayZ, which I think caters to a different expectation and we would probably be diluting our strengths if we were to emulate something like DayZ. Also, with the multiplication of zombie games, it’s good to have games that have their own focus, so then everyone can find something that suits their tastes.)

With a colleague in tow, Cardahi shows off a brief, 20-minute game play demo that highlights one of Riptide’s new additions. It’s one of several passages of play woven into Riptide’s campaign that mashes together Gears of War’s Horde mode and Left 4 Dead’s tense survival set-pieces. In a jungle clearing, Cardahi and co fortify the crumbling ruins of a church with rolls of fencing, makeshift mines and a mobile machinegun emplacement. Soon after, a water pump is activated that sets about noisily draining the flooded foundations of the church and thus heralds the arrival of the undead.

Wave after wave throws itself at the defences, which are repaired and replaced in between attacks. Nonetheless, they are finally breached when a couple of undead grenadiers show up to lob explosives that knock the survivors and friendly NPCs off their feet and blow apart the makeshift barricades. A tense struggle ensures and by miraculous coincidence the water pump finishes its job moments after the last of the undead are hacked in to fried, bloody chunks by way of battery-powered combat knife.