“Welcome to the zombie apocalypse experience of a lifetime – and now more beautiful than ever. Caught in the midst of an epic zombie outbreak on the tropical island of Banoi, your only thought is: Survive!“

I owned the original Dead Island on my PS3 back in the day during my big zombie phase. I didn’t remember everything about the game, but it certainly wasn’t a game I felt negative about. To continue my quest of playing PS4 remasters 10years late, I picked up Dead Island: Definitive Collection from a retro game store 15 min away. This collection comes with remastered versions of Dead Island, Dead Island: Riptide, and a 2D game called Dead Island: Retro Revenge.

The original’s reworked visuals look nice, with the biggest focus being on the lighting. I did not watch a comparison video for this specifically, but I’m sure load times were improved as well. However, one area where the game suffers in the same way that I felt Metroid Prime Remastered did, is that this game is clearly from 2011. Some examples are:

• I have to squint to read the skill tree or weapon upgrade menu text, why is it so tiny
• To use a super move called “Fury”, you have to hold down the circle button for like 5 seconds, with no indication that you’re about to use it. I thought something was wrong 
• If you get knocked down by an enemy, you have to watch this slow ass animation of your character getting up. It gets old quick
• I understand that Dead Island offers online multiplayer and could be the way devs intended the game be played, but explain to me why when I am playing by myself and I die, I have to watch a timer count down to respawn. It’s just me, what does that do?
• When loading into a new section of the map, be prepared for a million side quest notifications

One thing I guess I completely forgot is that this game is 75% fetch quest. There are only so many times I can take having an NPC promise me to give me something to progress further in the story, but not until after I complete 3-5 missions for them, before I start swearing at them. The examples above really annoyed me, and by the end of my play session I was ready to be done.

Riptide actually offered a skill tree upgrade that fixed my issue with the getting knocked down animation, introducedweapon skill levels, and new enemy types. This was my first time playing the game, and those are the only positive things about it. Some negatives:

• The jungle is incredibly frustrating to navigate
• Bugs on bugs
• Enemy difficulty is raised. Not in a challenging way, but more so a “Are you serious?” way
• In the original game, you could press up on the control pad to view the weapon inventory menu. In Riptide, that is gone. You have to press the touchpad and then use the right analog stick if you want to go directly to the weapons. Why???
• The map almost never outlines the path to the current mission anymore

I hated it. I did not play Retro Revenge as it did not interest me. Like I mentioned previously, the visual improvements look nice and I guess it’s cool to own another game collection from the PS3 days. But just because I own it again, does not mean I will play it again.