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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. But Dead Island Riptide holds the truth. 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. When it comes to the end of the world, it's the boring stuff that really kills you.That wasn't always the case with Dead Island, though. 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. 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.
So, first things first, then: Dead Island Riptide is a much more polished game. 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. Restarting it at a generous automatic checkpoint solved the problem. The horror stories of missing triggers for story events and calamitous glitching and clipping seem to be things of the past.
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