Rock, Paper, Shotgun

By Nathan Grayson on November 6th, 2012 at 11:00 am.

Sometimes, I think zombies are just a giant metaphor for our pervasive cultural fear of other people. And so, as Dead Island demonstrates, we keep that oh-so-frightening Other at arm’s length by thwacking it upside the head with a boat paddle. Or at least, I know that’s how I deal with my interpersonal problems. However, Dead Island: Riptide (Get it? It stands for “rest in peace… tide”) is adding a fifth playable character, and he likes to resolve his conflicts up-close-and-personal. His name’s John Morgan, and he’s not even the least bit afraid of the one thing scarier than a brain-devouring End of Days: human contact. So he punches people. Dead people, no less. Ewwwww.

Here’s Morgan’s blurb-o-gram, straight from Deep Silver and Techland… land:

“For years he has trained himself – and become a master – in hand-to-hand combat. His career in the US Navy has not taken off as he originally had envisioned, so he spends his time as a cook on a military ship. Little does he know that soon he will have to bring his skills into practice when the ship nears the island of Palanai.”

I’m wondering, though, how his character progression will work. I mean, characters in the original Dead Island had skill trees, but those mainly offered stat boosts. The real meat of it, of course, came from hoarding zombie-horde-born loot and upgrading it with crazy duct-tape/car battery mods and things of the like. Granted – even if it doesn’t really make sense in the context of the setting – Morgan could just equip fist weapons, I suppose. Maybe he could cobble together something elementally charged or even along the (hilarious) lines of Pushy from Fallout: New Vegas? I would like that very much.

Beyond that, Techland and Deep Silver noted that Morgan was inspired by popular hand-to-hand-based mods of the original Dead Island. I really, really, really hope they were referring to this one.