Rip Current Game Review

New game! Let’s get into it:

In Rip Current, we infiltrate a facility called “Post Salvos” where experiments were being done. Our character is Carter, a woman working with a Private Military Corp (PMC) with a pilot named Evans. Already in my head, I’m making bets on who is going to die in this game. The atmosphere is creepy from the start, as we are infiltrating at night with the usual dim flashlight that only shows us two feet in front of our faces.

We are attacked by a dimetrodon, and apparently Carter has never seen a dinosaur before…? I mean, none of us have really seen living dinosaurs, but Carter is questioning what just attacked her as she is very calm on what’s happening around her. She describes the dinosaurs as “creatures”, with Evans not questioning what they are. Did I mention that Evans is in our ears? He’s also pretty loud, but, I prefer loud as opposed to too soft. A good thing about this game is that there are subtitles as well. Bonus points!

As we progress into the facility, there is stealth in this game, something I was not expecting, because we only have a pistol and a knife to defend ourselves. After getting around the stealth, we listen to a tape from Dr. Torres, a lead bioengineer at the facility saying that they engineered the dinosaurs to withstand the changing ecosystem and survive the harsh environment of the ocean. Okay, cool, dinosaurs are cool.

There is a huge Spinosaurus that pops up like Mr. X in the Resident Evil games, great for scares, hate this for my heart whenever it does pop up. And the heavens above must have heard my plea for defense because Carter finds a shotgun, to which she comments that now she has stopping power. We are looking for clues to what happened, and now we have to make our way to a hatchery.

Our character finally and rightfully so reacts to a woman in a paddle boat being swallowed whole by a mosasaurus, which, if you’re not familiar, is like a blue whale with teeth everywhere. Navigating the pathway to the hatchery was a showcase of several large and small mosasaurus creatures that I felt took entirely too long to traverse. No bonus points.

Did I mention that raptor-like creatures are what you’re hiding from in the stealth areas? I believe they are called Baryonyx, but they are like the Spinosaurus without the fin, and much smaller. But still have the threat of teeth.

You get a splendid view of a plesiosaur swimming once you’re in the hatchery, in which there are multiples of them popping their heads out of the water. In this part, I didn’t know if I should be scared or just carry on, but it was still creepy to me. We find a list of the dinosaurs they reproduced, all except for the plesiosaur being apex predators. We move from raptor-like creatures to crocodiles patrolling in the high waters as we hop from platform to platform to not fall in the water. There’s a lot of water in this game, in which the sound engineering is pretty good.

The scientists begin to use an artificial intelligence (AI) to manipulate the genes and decide for them if a creature should live or die. The AI begins to favor aggression over balance and starts to see the scientists as a problem in their variables. This is yet another example of why humans should not trust machines, but that’s another topic for another day. Let’s just say that I’m still jaded from Skynet.

Kudos to the game for hyping up the fear factor as the mosasaurus plays peek-a-boo with us as we navigate to the data center. I’m starting to feel a little bit of game fatigue with navigating the water levels and having everything about this game, even the indoors, being in the dark. And can I just say that getting rushed by a dinosaur like I’m a quarterback with the ball and they are a linebacker is argument enough for me to decline wanting to bring back dinosaurs? Don’t get me wrong, dinosaurs are cool, but that’s coming from the perspective of someone who has never encountered a living one. Let’s keep them as bones and fossils.

That Spinosaurus keeps popping up and I can’t help but think it’s going to be the final boss.

We go to the data center and have to progress through marshlands and this game gives me a different level of anxiety in the sense that I’m always on alert. In the story, the scientists decided to terminate Siren, the AI, because the machine was classifying the humans as a threat. Okay, good call. However, Siren detected the danger to it’s system, and released a nerve gas to get rid of the personnel. Whoopsie.

We shut down the server the AI was using and grab Siren herself along with the data to the facility. This part is where I thought things would get ugly, but as we activate the nerve gas the scientists were going to use before Siren stopped them, we are chased in a final sequence by what it seems like everything that we encountered in the game as we make our escape to Evans. And…that’s the end. It felt rushed, but I was glad for the experience to be over because now we were literally heading off into the sunset (sunrise, actually) and we finally saw light that didn’t come from our lousy flashlight.

Conclusion

Now, you can get this game on Steam for $9. Is it worth the money? Yes, I say that the ticket price is worth the entry. Folks were comparing this game to Dino Crisis, a game which I haven’t played, but you can’t help but think of the most recent Jurassic Park movie while playing this game. In any case, Rip Current plays out like a B-movie and it’s a good popcorn game for a quick jaunt through a creepy place and it’s hard to go wrong with dinosaurs.