Dead Island Riptide: First Impressions

Today has seen the release of Dead Island Riptide; the sequel to the surprise package Dead Island.  If you've never played or heard of Dead Island then it simplifies itself as a Zombie survival story set on a tropical island, where 4 survivors immune to the infection try to escape.  The game is a mixture of the XP and  quest whoring of games like Borderlands with the zombie fighting of games like Dead Rising/Left 4 Dead.

So is Riptide as good or even better than the first Dead Island?  If I'm being totally honest then no.

Riptide picks up exactly where Dead Island finished off, in the story and the game as a whole.  The fighting system is exactly the same and just as clunky, the character animations and voice acting are just as wooden and unsynchronised as before.  The game still suffers from bugs and glitches much as the last game, and only time will tell as to if there are more or less.

After playing with the game for about 2 hours I've realised that this is not a sequel in the true form, instead this essentially Dead Island re-branded and repackaged in a new city with a few new characters.  Yeah there are a few new things; for example the safe camp defence quests, the ability to drive a boat (it's a car on water with a turbo button), and new camp based missions for your camp members.

This game is not going to be for you if you expected a new Dead Island with a massive overhaul with everything having been retuned and made amazing.  If you are looking for a game to play with your friends for a bit of Zombie killing and a laugh at how bad the game is, much like you probably did before, then pick this up.

I will leave you with one last thing; don't buy this game as a single player game because it's boring and I'd honestly recommend that you wait until a price drop until you pick it up.

Cosplayer of the Month: April

In an attempt to make sure I post somewhat more regularly on this post I'm working this week on some new recurring blog posts for the site. My first idea was this post: Cosplayer of the Month.  So as you probably already know this months (and my first ever) cosplayer of the month is the beautiful and amazing Destiny Nickelsen.

If you don't know of Destiny Nickelsen she is an american cosplayer hailing out of the state of Georgia.  She has been cosplaying for a couple of years now and has cosplayed as an array of characters including; Black Cat, Juliet Starling, Supergirl, Mario, Bulma and more recently Injustice Harley Quinn among others.

In her time cosplaying she has won awards for Best Craftsmanship (Expert) at the Amazing Arizona Comic Con 2013 & Miss Southern Cospitality 2013.

Not only does she make some great costumes, she's also a genuinely lovely person and more importantly finds time to interact with her many fans on twitter.  She currently has just over 2,000 followers on twitter and over 11,000 likes on her Facebook page.  Although this is quite a sizeable amount I genuinely believe that she should have alot more than this so I will link her webpages below and do go and hit those Like & Follow buttons.

I will say that the main reason I have chose Miss Nickelsen is because Injustice: Gods Among Us is out now and I've yet to see a better Injustice based cosplay than hers.  So here are some pictures of a few of her awesome cosplays and don't forget to check her pages out at the bottom of the page.

Black Cat

Harley Quinn (Injustice)

Supergirl

Juliet Starling

Destiny's Facebook: www.facebook.com/OfficialDestinyNickelsen

Destiny's Twitter:  www.twitter.com/R2Des2

Destiny's Store:  destinynickelsen.storenvy.com/

The Tomb Raider Problem

Recently I purchased the new Tomb Raider game having heard many good things about the game via reviews and word of mouth.  I initially gave it a few days before starting the single player campaign so that I could fully commit to it without being distracted by things I had to do on other games or to a lesser extent, my life.

Once started though I found the campaign extremely difficult thing to stop player, a testament to this being the first evening where it took me after 5 hours of playing to finally turn it off to get sleep.  The game looks amazing, the story draws you in and makes you want to keep playing to find out how Lara actually gets off the island, and the gameplay is as good as Tomb Raider has ever been.  I would wholly recommend this game to anyone who loved the original Tomb Raider games, and also to anyone who loves a good adventure game.  As with all good games it has it's downsides; the overall story is quite short considering the pure brilliance of the story and the other one being collectibles.  This however is a personal preference because I much prefer to play a storyline rather than spend my free time looking for obscure pointless things that are hidden around the world.  You can always extend the story playing time by hunting the collectibles during the story but I get to distracted by my quest/goal to easily.

The single player is brilliant however I have reached a major problem with the game; the as titled 'Tomb Raider Problem'.

The problem is the second half of the game; the multiplayer.  I can only point blame to the huge successes of games like Call of Duty and Halo that have made the gaming industry think that almost every game has to have online multiplayer.  It's my own personal opinion, and from what I've read from general consensus, that the multiplayer is shockingly terrible and a pointless addition to the game.  To me Tomb Raider has always been a single player game and not a game where I thought the ability to play against each other is what the game was missing.

Even though the online multiplayer has put a massive dent in the game, it has shifted over 3 million copies since release which is a reasonably solid display.  Square Enix however have seen this as a failure compared that their financial expectations for the game.  I get the feeling that if Square Enix and Crystal Dynamics had got rid of the multiplayer and instead concentrated on the single player then they could have sold so many more copies of the game.  If they had invested all that time on extending the single player campaign, enriching the experience even more then this new revamp of the series would have been a phenomenal success.

The issue is that everything has to have multiplayer nowadays and too many games companies can't just plan for a totally single player game.  The companies are too focused on trying to achieve sales of Call of Duty's magnitude to not realise that there is still a big market for good, solid single player games.  You only have to look at games like Skyrim, Fallout 3 and the Arkham series of Batman games to show you that totally single player games still have a place in the gaming world.

I still hold a considerable amount of hope that the generalised collection of games companies will realise that online multiplayer isn't required in every single game, and that they lower their expectations and stop striving for sales figures that are ridiculously high.  But maybe that is a fools hope.