Dead Island: Riptide

As a couple who like to play couch co-op or link up our 2 X Boxes and play co-op online together, my husband and I are always on the lookout for new co-op games. I'm not a big fan of the real life army genre of games, just like I'm not a fan of realistic fiction or biographies. In my opinion the world is upsetting enough without reality interfering with my down time. Now don't get me wrong I will shoot aliens and zombies all day long. In fact, I love me some zombies.

When the first Dead Island game came out we were ecstatic. We played the hell out of that game, despite numerous bugs and crashings. The bugs in that game were so severe we had to start over a few times, losing all of our progress and items. But we still played it 4 times with 4 different characters. That's how much we loved that game. So, when Dead Island: Riptide came out we were psyched. New weapons, new zombies to kill, new beautiful island vistas to be terrified in. Now before we got around to playing Dead Island:Riptide I read some not so glowing reviews. There were a lot of complaints about it being just more of the same as Dead Island, with only a few new locales and baddies to distinguish it. However, seeing as we loved the original we had no problem with this. Hell with new missions and Items we would probably have happily replayed on the original island. Also, we assumed that without a great change in gameplay would come a more stable game without all of the problems and crashings that plagued the original. 

 We took our time playing through the first two chapters making sure we got all the mods and all the secrets. Then yesterday when we were just about to reach chapter 3 we started crashing... Hard.  It wasn't a problem when we played solo, only when we tried to play co-op. So you could conceivably continue this very co-op dependent game solo, but where's the fun in that? We went on the forums looking for solutions. After trying all of the fixes suggested online we gave up  for the day. 

Now we're not giving up for good but next weekend when we go to play games together we might reach for Battle Block Theater or Halo Reach or even play Bioshock Infinite at the same time on our two separate consoles. 

Buggy games like this are just unacceptable. If you must release a game that's a mess at least have the decency to patch or update it as soon as possible. I read an email from Deepsilver on one forum wherein Deepsilver blamed Microsoft servers for the crashing which if you've crashed in this game makes no sense. We're going to try system link to solve the problem,  but we're not hopeful. So gamers beware of Dead Island: Riptide when it works it's a great co-op zombie killing time but, if regular and unsolvable crashing makes you angry it might be worth passing on this one.