Ryder White (Dead Island DLC)

Let’s just kick off by making this point: If you have not completed the Dead Island campaign, then you do not need to purchase this DLC. This is technically both a prequel and a side timeline based piece of DLC where you play the key antagonist, Ryder White, and how he came to be the final boss fight in the game. A large chunk of the backstory is already explained in the full game, in fact almost all of it, as we already were well aware of a large chunk of Ryder’s past. Therefore, until you complete it this DLC will do very little for you. However, what little new information that is portrayed (which I shall not spoil here) about Ryder himself is at least interesting, it’s just not a rich tapestry of a tale which will leave you teary-eyed and forgiving for all of the original Dead Island’s (and, in fact, this DLC’s) failings.

I feel it’s worth noting now, before I think too much about the DLC, that I was a fan of Dead Island. It wasn’t all it promised, but it did deliver a very stupid yet enjoyable four player co-op romp which I played through with a group of friends from start to finish over a few weeks, slowly levelling our survivor characters, and it was quite enjoyable. The graphics glitched every so often, hit detection was frequently off, the locations became drab and monotonous fast, and it quickly became repetitive and tedious towards the end. The Ryder White DLC decides that fun isn’t something which belongs in Dead Island anymore, so this DLC is single player only, with no levelling system, consists of only some of the same locations as the actual game, and even threw in a final kick to the balls by having no extra achievements added.

I’ll be frank here: the Ryder White DLC didn’t just make me sad, or bored, it made me genuinely angry. There is no reason for any of this DLC to exist. You walk from Point A to Point B (and sometimes back again) in a linear plotline which was totally unnecessary as we learned all but the tiniest details in the actual Dead Island campaign. I can forgive a dull story, but there’s no co-op. I can see they did it because the backstory of a singular character wouldn’t work with four people, but that’s my point; that’s why the DLC shouldn’t exist. The reason few played Dead Island solo was because the engine and combat system is not suited to taking on that many enemies at once alone. At one point, I was expected to fight off more than 15 simultaneously! It can’t be done. You could have 50 health packs, but in the time it takes to inject yourself with one the group of zombies, which take off 1/10th of your life bar per hit, will have you backed against a wall firing futilely until you die and reload your last checkpoint. Are the checkpoints reasonably spaced? Yes. Does it matter? No. Not a damn bit! When you respawn so do all the zombies; any weapons, ammo or health you used in the previous battle, though, is gone. That doesn’t even happen once, it’ll happen at several checkpoints, almost all of which have no notable weapons cache to keep yourself stocked from.

The most angering part though is the complete lack of effort that this DLC reeks of. All the faults that are in the original Dead Island are still present here, only with more thrown into the mix. All the locations are the same (only more limited: the city, the sewers, and the prison), the hit detection is still way off, the frustrating checkpoints, and the total lack of multiplayer just all leave a really bad taste in my mouth. Especially when it’s priced at a whopping 800 MSP for what equates to little more than three hours (minus checkpoint tom-foolery) of the same faults you had to put up with before, only without a group of friends to laugh it off with and keep hammering away with those canoe paddles you all carried since the very first zombie.