When Dead Rising 3 begins, you are in a confined space with zombies around every corner, nothing to blow your socks off but enough to take notice on how many characters are on screen. But the moment you walk outside for the first time and lay your eyes on a massive freeway crushed my a commerical airliner with thousands of zombies filling in the gaps, you may have to find your jaw that just fell on the floor. It's one of the few games that made me feel like the new tech was absolutely needed to make such an impressive sight. Bringing along a less punishing game and trademark goofiness, Dead Rising 3 is an easy recommendation for a new console owner
Dead Rising returns as an exclusive once again, this time on the Xbox One, bringing a more accessible game for new players and all the zombies you could ever dream of. Right off the bat, veterans of the series will recognize the series trademark "timed story" to be completely gone from the normal story mode. While side quests still adhere to a time limit, the campaign will no longer end if you don't make it to a mission in time. This allows you to complete all the side missions within the game, collect statues and blueprints for weapons or just kill a ton of zombies without feeling hampered by the available mission time. To say that there is no time pressure isn't entirely true, there is essentially a doomsday clock that is constantly ticks down in which the end result is an airstrike on your head and the end of the game. It's there but just enough to push you along at a decent pace and actually prevented me from burning myself out on the game. Gameplay remains pretty standard to previous games, your character moves with a bit of weight and almost anything you can see you can use as a weapon. You can level with the the infamous PP you gain doing missions and saving survivors and put points into one of the many categories that are available. These range from giving you more health to being able to use similar items for combo weapons rather than having the exact pieces laid out initially. However, the large changes lie in the new combo system and setting of the game. For the first time, Dead Rising is completely open from the start, other than a few missions there are virtually no load times making the pacing of the game naturally feel better. You can travel the large town of Los Perdidos by foot or by the wide range of vehicles from busted up vans to a firetruck/forklift combo that impales zombies up close and uses fireworks to send them into the night sky from afar. There is a simple joy to driving from one area to the next while watching your kill counter constantly roll higher and higher. Dead Rising 3 expands combo weapons to a substantial degree; No longer do you have to assemble weapons on a specific bench you can now simply do it once you have the correct items. You can even combine combo weapons with a 3rd option or even a combo weapon with yet another combo weapon to create a "Super Combo". This can range from making a lightsabe...errr I mean laser swords to a football strapped with grenades and even a demented but effective jack in the box trap. It makes finding new blueprints for weapons a pleasure to do and its always exciting to see what kind of insane weapon you will be duct taping together next. Like before, the game can be played in co op with the second player being a character from the main story that is kind of there just for co op instead of having two Nicks at once. It works well but the game is viable as a lone journey if that's what you prefer. If the more accessible nature of the game turns you off a bit don't worry, Nightmare Mode is more like vanilla Dead Rising with timers on all missions along with some tougher enemies as ell to crank of the challenge like previous games. Part of me wishes the timer was more of a toggle rather than strapped to a single game mode but it hardly an issue and more of a nitpick thing to complain about.
The story of Dead Rising 3 is thin but just compelling enough to keep you trotting towards the finish line which has one of the most crazy and fantastic pay offs in recent memory. You play as Nick Ramos, an engineer just trying to escape the zombie apocalypse with all his appendages still connected to his body. The game gives little setup to the outbreak you have been stranded in but that's not a bad thing, It gave a little mystery to an otherwise standard zombie story that sort of sags in the middle. Naturally, you meet some fellow characters along they way (albeit not exactly likable ones) and eventually find a nice quiet spot to discuss just how the in the world you are going to escape this hell hole. From here you begin to piece together the actual story of whats going down in Los Perdidos and lead up to the big bombastic and ultimately fantastic finale. Missions are mostly short and sweet, costing of maybe one too many fetch quests but there is overall a good amount of variety in the game to keep things fresh and interesting. One of the more notable things about the mission structure that I admired was the presence of choices you can make along the way. The key here is they aren't outright told to you like most games tend to do. The idea may be hinted at within the dialogue but there is never text that says "You can do X or you can do Y". As in previous games, there are letter grades for each type of ending and depending on the choices you make skews you into the ending that fit your playthrough. Apart from the main story that plays it pretty straight, there are a handful of side missions that are much more goofy and enjoyable, such as recruiting "hot male" zombies to be in the next big porn movie a fellow survivor is trying to make. Along with these side missons are the pshyocpath boss fights which are attached to their on absurdity. I noticed that these are far easier than before which I think is for the better as some in the previous games were frusterating and a tedious.
Dead Rising keeps going from mission waypoint to waypoint interesting by filling every last space full of zombies, it is truly staggering to see how many of these things can be on screen at once. Fighting down an entire street with thousands of zombies is a common occurrence and may sound like a chore but with the massive collection of combo weapons it makes this task a delight. The game renders all this along with random cars exploding and other nonsense with a mostly stable framerate. I only endured a few places that I could really tell the game was struggling but even then it's truly impressive the technical wizardry pulled off in Dead Rising 3. The rest of the game looks solid enough but there is a fair amount of pop in textures than can be distracting at times but isn't a huge issue. Paired with all this chaos is a fantastic sound design, every sword, bench, sledgehammer, chainsaw has a satisfying sound to go with it that just cranks the intensity up one more notch to 11. Voice acting is done just as well except for Nicks character which comes off as a scared little boy in most of the cut-scenes even though to get to that point he had to chomp through an entire battalion of the zombie horde.
Dead Rising 3 is just a really fun game that is an early example of what these consoles can do. The story falters from time to time but makes up for it with an incredible endgame and strong start. Combat remains fun and inventive, putting together two abstract things to make a zombie killing machine never really got old after the 20 hours I put into Dead Rising. Whether your choice of zombie killing consists of driving over zombies with your car or breathing fire on them with your dragon mask, you are sure to have one heck of a time doing it.