Dead Island Riptide & Sacred Citadel Previews

It’s a cold morning in London as I walk into a dark nightclub. As I’m funneled through hallways I catch a glimpse of a steamy, smokey jungle scene, fake grass aplenty and trees, branches and other foliage obscuring the door. I’ve been invited down by Deep Silver to take a look at some of their upcoming games and I’m about to go take a look at Dead Island Riptide and Sacred Citadel, two games that surprisingly have something in common at their core.

Dead Island Riptide

Dead Island Riptide plays an awful lot like the original Dead Island, pitting a group of survivors against hordes of zombies. There are a couple of balance changes that will affect not only the gameplay flow, but also narrative tension. The most notable is that weapons now do more damage and ammo for weapons is more powerful. This allows you to play a little more frantically, running full force at zombies knowing you’ll be able to fight your way out of a crowd, but this does have a pretty substantial effect on the games tension and feelings of danger. As long as I didn’t do anything truly idiotic, I knew I was safe from death in most of its forms.

One welcome change to the game’s combat is in regards to the weapon degradation system. Weapons still break down as you use them, but by sticking to a single weapon class you can become more proficient with that class, which will slow down the rate at which it weakens and breaks. This is a nice change if you find a way you like playing the game and stick with it, but it does seem to penalise experimentation and jumping between weapons types which was one of my favourite parts of the original game.

Riptide definitely continues the original’s focus on co-op gameplay. I played through around half an hour of the game with a group and – particularly when it came to the new base defense segments – being able to have people with different weapons at different points working as a team to keep the zombies out of your safe haven certainly worked better than trusting the AI to do the job.

The AI characters at times seemed to have some kind of attention span shortening condition, constantly shifting from one thing to another and not staying terribly focused on what they were doing. Where you can direct co-op partners to build a fence at an entrance and stick to defending that entrance to the base, the AI seemed to be magnetically attracted to wherever most of the zombies were, regardless of if that was the best place for them to defend.

I was able to play through the game’s opening mission, as well as seeing some cutscenes that gave a good idea of the game’s story. Where the first game was all about untrained civilians taking on this contained threat, you’re now instead playing as characters that primarily have some kind of military background. The zombie outbreak is spreading beyond the resort of the first game and you’re out to try and stop it spreading even further. Again, it seems like story will be taking a back seat to gameplay as it did in the first game, but by placing the story in the shoes of characters with a military background, you can expect to see even more enemies at a time, and to be slaying them even more efficiently than before. This does feel cool, even if it’s rarely tense.

Sacred Citadel Preview

Sacred Citadel is a side scrolling beat ’em up that, like Dead Island Riptide, is designed around co-op play. You and your friends select one of three different character classes (Warrior, Ranger and Shaman), using them to blast your way through waves of enemies, collect loot, level up and progress to the next area. Think Diablo 3, but in 2.5D and with more of a focus on button mashing.

Your three classes are all set up to complement each other nicely when working together. First up is the warrior, who serves as your tank, causing huge amounts of damage and able to withstand a heavy beating. Providing the party with speed and ranged attacks is the ranger. Able to attack from a distance and hold off incoming troops, the ranger’s most effective when funnelling enemies in a straight line toward the warrior and their huge damage-dealing area of effect. Last up is the shaman, who acts mainly as a healer class but does have some weak offensive damage at their command.

One of the most immediately eye-catching things about Sacred Citadel is its art style. The game is much more colourful than other games of this style, avoiding all the browns, greys and blacks the genre is often associated with. The world is bright, colourful, and uses the kind of colour palette you might find in a child’s set of crayons. That’s not to say it isn’t violent; this isn’t a child-friendly beat ’em up, but it’s refreshing to see a game stray outside that predictable range of gritty and dark colours that often accompany combat-heavy games.

What do you think? Are you excited for either Dead Island Riptide or Sacred Citadel? Does a shift from tension to action in Dead Island bother you? What brown, grey and black game would you like to see get a colourful coat of paint? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

Dead Island Riptide is coming to Xbox 360, PS3 and PC on 26th April. Sacred Citadel will be released on PSN, XBLA, Steam and other digital sellers during in 2013.

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