Ryder White Dead Island DLC Review

Ryder White DLC Review | May 1, 2014
Xbox, Windows, PlayStation

In Dead Island you are getting directions from a man named Ryder White. He needs you to find a way to him so he can use your immunity to save his wife who is infected and create a vaccine. The entire game is based on his directions and orders but how did he get on the island and why was he there in the first place was never really answered. In the DLC Ryder White you get your answers plus you find out everything that was going on in the prison while the rest of the group was trying to make their way off the island.

From a story point of view Ryder White is excellent. There was several things that happen before your character wakes up at the start of Dead Island and Ryder White was the reason why. He gets dropped into the town of Moresby the night before you wake up when the military is trying to contain the outbreak and many of the barriers are still up to block off the infected from the population. Ryder Whites story and gameplay is not as open world as Dead Island. Most of his journey is very linear and he only gets to explore small parts of the city, the sewers and areas of the prison. Some of the prison has new places to explore but most of the DLC you are in an area you have been through in Dead Island. Ryder White focuses the combat more in the area of a 1st person shooter and not a 1st person melee like Dead Island does. This makes sense because Ryder has the support of the military that is dropping weapons and ammo in the area.

We were surprised how much we liked the story and how much it filled in the gaps. The DLC has the same issues as the game, unstable camera, stamina runs down to quick and aiming is pointlessly difficult. Ryder Whites campaign also removes any RPG elements, to level up or abilities to unlock. This means there is no point to attacking the zombies since you don’t get anything for it. You will also die a lot, you die in this DLC more than you die in Dead Island. The weapon upgrades have been scaled back too. There are not very many weapon modifications to find and the ones you do find are just OK or they are useless with a few that are good. The entire campaign took us over 4 hours the first time through but that is with exploring around. You could realistically go through the whole DLC in under three hours. That is really short on gameplay and makes the $10 price a bit steep, plus with no stats to level up it makes replay a little boring but you do get to keep whatever weapons you had after you go all the way through the story in replay. Wait for a sale and keep your price under $5 to make it worth it. We really like the story, it throws some good curve balls and changes how you view on Dead Island but it is only a few hours long and we miss leveling up our character and weapon modifications.

7.0 out of 10
Average Game