As we’ve discussed in other articles, we must approach launch titles with realistic expectations. We don’t excuse bad games, but we keep in mind that we can only expect so much from them. When I started Ryse I went in with low expectations and I was pleasantly surprised to find out it was okay. Likewise, I did not expect gold from Dead Rising 3, and boy, I didn’t get it. Capcom’s third installment of sandbox survival action title arrives on the Xbox One in shiny wrapping with the some neat aspects to show off what your new console can do, but beneath this shallow layer of glitz is a game that disappoints in just about every regard.
DR3 puts you in the fictional California city of Los Perdidos where a zombie outbreak has overrun the city and the military has quarantined the entire area. You play Nick Ramos, a young, affable mechanic who along with a group of other survivors, is looking for a way to escape the city before the US government bombs it off the map to stop the infection. Teaming up with an eclectic cast of misfits you’ll fight zombies, do battle with psychopaths and work against a government conspiracy, discovering Nick’s mysterious past and his connection to the zombie plague.
Dead Rising is a handsome game, or at least as much as a zombie horde can be. While the game may only run in 720p, it still looks pretty good. Each individual undead is rendered with plenty of gruesome details, and while the graphics don’t feel like they’re pushing the new hardware too hard, it does a really impressive job handling a screen full of hundreds of zombies without slowing down or getting choppy. Others have reported frame loss and performance issues, but I didn’t notice it much at all. Nick fights his way through throngs of undead, lopping off limbs and splitting open “anatomically correct” zombies full of guts and organs. While I quickly grew desensitized to the violence, I still got visceral satisfaction from slicing a zombie in half and seeing all their insides like a science class display.
The gameplay is very simple, and at first that’s just fine. You can fight with a wide array of guns and melee weapons, including some pretty novel combo weapons that are delightfully inane. Nick strikes with light and heavy attacks and while for the most part you’ll just want to mash the heavy attack button to deal with most situations. The game features hundreds of weapons which all handle differently, so despite having only two attacks there is enough variety to switch things up a little bit. The first time you’re surrounded by a pack of zombies and start cleaving through them ten at a time is pretty satisfying. In fact, that novelty doesn’t ever seem to get old, especially as you get bigger, deadlier weapons and start racking up kill combos of hundreds and hundreds of zombies. The first hour or so of gameplay is pretty enjoyable, though totally mindless. The problem is the rest of the game. Just about everything that’s not killing zombies is lazy and frustrating.
The storyline is divided into a series of missions, almost of all of which have you traverse across the game’s rather large map from one point to another. The map is separated into four different cities which are accessible via zombie-infested highways. You will spend a frustrating amount of time going from point A to point B in this game, as almost every mission starts in one city and has you go to another one and several times will have you drive from one city to another, only to encounter some contrived obstacle that requires you to go to point C located in another city. There are vehicles which you can drive, but every city is heavily roadblocked, which makes it difficult to even get to the highway (Roadblocks are usually, but not always marked on the map). This is likely to prevent you from just going through the whole game in the relative safety of a vehicle, which would be fine, but the game has you travel so much that it quickly becomes a dreadful chore to get around.
You can also recruit other survivors into your posse by doing side-missions. In DR3 these missions are entirely optional, which is good because almost all of them are a bland and unimaginative combination of fetch quests and escort missions, but they do provide experience to level up with. The bigger issue is that once you’ve recruited survivors you’ll spend more time babysitting them than being helped by them. They’ll fight readily enough using weapons you give them, but they almost always run headfirst into big groups of zombies and proceed to get chewed to pieces. If you try to run from a tight situation they’ll stay and fight for a long time before following, and if you get into a car they’ll stand around dumbstruck for what feels like an eternity before finally getting on board. Also, you can harm them with your attacks and they love nothing more than to run directly into your line of fire when there are enemies about. All of this means that it’s only a matter of time before your dumbass teammates die, and soon you will grow tired of feeding them a constant supply of healing items and just remove them from the party or hack them to pieces in frustration.
Also, if you’re the second player in multiplayer you have to be Joe Dirt.
The psychopath boss battles return to DR3 and this time they’re ridiculously easy. But they’re still bad. The boss designs are pretty uninspired and one is absolutely disgusting. Almost every boss operates by running through a standard repetition of moves that they go through seemingly without regard for what the player is doing. They will stand in place, mindlessly going through an attack cycle even if you’ve run away, and once that cycle begins almost nothing will stop it. For everything outside of boss battles you’ll want to use melee weapons, which do more damage, last longer and kill more enemies at one time. For boss battles you’ll just want to have guns, because there’s no way to get close to a boss without getting caught in whatever attack they’re going through, so you’ll just want to stand back and chip away at them with an assault rifle while they remain mostly stationary.
The biggest issue with the game is that there just isn’t much to it, and what’s there isn’t much fun. True, the endless gore of slicing through massive crowds of zombies was entertaining to the very end, but as soon as I had to go perform a mission or drive somewhere it feels slapped together and lazy, if not just outright painful. If you were to just mess around with it for two or three hours you would probably have a great time, but if you want to play it from the start to finish it has nothing good to offer you at the end of the game that you couldn’t do at the start.
The sheer inanity is fun for a little while
The game isn’t entirely without good aspects. There are plenty of collectibles, many in the form of blueprints which allow you to build weapon and vehicle combinations, some of which turn into some pretty satisfying creations. You also gets some pretty useful moves as you level up, making it easier to deal with zombies. The game’s time limit is far more lax than previous games and you can save wherever you want (Which you want to do often, as dying costs you all your progress, even collectibles). While the game’s story is mostly like a bad B-movie, the main character Nick is a nice change of pace. He’s nervous and lacking in confidence, yet still a good guy. Like an awkward Nathan Drake he’s a little more fun to slog through the game with than another gruff and battle-hardened protagonist. None of this redeems the game or makes it worth the rest of the experience, but finding the blueprint for a giant teddy bear machine gun turret can be a pretty bright spot in an otherwise dreary and boring mission.
Dead Rising 3 is everything I would expect from a launch title. It looks nice and is fun to play briefly, but it doesn’t hold up to any amount of scrutiny. Fans of the series may find something redeeming here, but the lazy implementation and design are too glaring to make this title worth the effort for the rest of us. If you love Dead Rising then maybe you can forgive it and get some enjoyment out of the experience, but I would say skip it.
