Dead Rising 3 Review

After initially releasing as an Xbox exclusive in 2006, then switching to multiplatform in 2010, Dead Rising returns to exclusivity on the Xbox One with its third numerical entry. The series continues to loosely tie itself together with a bizarre cannon that registers closely to the weirdness of George A. Romero’s original zombie flicks. Dead Rising 3 follows in the footsteps of the franchise’s strange history, throwing the obscene and grotesque in your face with a smile and a wink. Much like the rest of the series, Dead Rising 3 seems to be aware of its tone and thinks we should love it all the more for its brazen crassness. Whatever your feelings on the series’ odd tendencies, players will uniformly hate the constant bugs that plague the game, making Dead Rising 3 a technical mess.

While the franchise was created by the legendary designer, Kenji Inafune, it was forced to look for new direction following the nasty split between Inafune and Capcom. The result is a different look and starkly different difficulty. The first two games had old-school mechanics, with specific save locations and a timer constantly counting down. Dead Rising 3 discards these oddities in favor of an easier and less stressful game. The departure continues with the murky aesthetic, gone are Inafune’s bright colors and attempts at humor. Dead Rising 3 is a darker game, maybe not a serious game, but it lacks the outrageous stabs at laughs that the previous titles had.

On the whole, Dead Rising 3 is a solid zombie adventure, filled with plenty of gory fun for you to get lost in. Running around, grabbing collectibles and finding new ways to slay the undead has a solid rhythm and the layout of side quests is a strength of the design. Most of the side missions feel rewarding, especially as you begin to build a crew of survivors to roll with. Removing the headache of looking for workbenches has also improved the game’s pacing, and restocking at safe houses allows for more experimentation and discovery. All in all, Dead Rising 3 is a game that strives towards enjoyment. The game wants you to try making combo vehicles and crazy weapons, it wants you to go hunting for collectibles and to do all of the side missions.

That is not to say all of Dead Rising 3’s changes are for the better. The difficulty has been toned down to the point where it is almost impossible to die and thus the game lacks tension. There are moments in Dead Rising 3 where you find yourself ducking through a horde of zombies, hoping to come out the other end unscathed, but they are few and far between. By the end of the game, you will have survived so many zombie hordes that they feel almost insignificant, more of an annoyance than dangerous. There are also problems with the layout of the city, which has four neighborhoods each with only two entrance/exits. Throughout the game, more and more roadblocks are established, forcing you to take the same paths over and over again. After two thirds of the game, nothing feels new or interesting. The game has spent so much time being bombastic and one-upping itself that it no longer surprises or engages the player.

The characters populating Dead Rising 3, and the narrative driving the player forward, are also a mixed bag. The series has always offered some interesting characters with a hint of depth, then supported them with offensive cookie-cutter stereotypes. Dead Rising 3 is more of the same in this regard. The bad guys are bad because they are, and the good guys have hints of interesting moments that fall flat. Character motivations change at the drop of a hat, entire factions are wiped out because they have become inconvenient to the story, and other moments are just plain offensive. It’s hard to get too critical with the plot as the game seems pretty self-aware, almost taking pride in being bad and grotesque at times. Dead Rising 3 may lack the emotional storytelling other games have, but it’s not really interested in wowing you with plot, it mostly is just giving you another reason to go somewhere and kill more zombies.

If you want help in the zombie killing department, you can play the online cooperative mode. This seems to be the suggested way to play, given the selection screen lists the single player at the very bottom. When selecting cooperative play, the game will try to match you with players who share a similar playstyle, but it doesn’t really do anything to improve the game. In my experience with the multiplayer, players join the game and immediately start doing their own thing, seemingly uninterested in working together. I overhead one of my cooperative teammates saying they were simply using my advanced place in the game to quickly level up. There is no reason to play cooperatively. With no clear incentive to join forces, players seem to pass through each other’s games completely uninterested in interacting. Instead of helping you out, playing cooperatively can prevent certain actions from happening as the game requires both players to hit certain checkmarks before progressing. In the end, so little is gained by playing co-op, it makes more sense to lock people out and enjoy the single player.

Further hindering the experience of Dead Rising 3 are the technical aspects. The game has passed on amazing graphics, in favor pouring zombies onto your screen. Seeing these massive hordes moving, all with independent animation and AI is incredibly impressive and worth the graphical downgrade. For the most part, the game has also addressed the frame rate drops that plagued early demos. That being said, technical issues are still present, the most annoying of which are the bugs that prevent you from progressing. About halfway through the game, one such bug removed a character that I needed to speak to in order to progress. I tried completing side missions, reloading saves, and quitting the game. It was not until I turned off my Xbox One and turned it on again that the character finally reappeared. There were numerous other technical problems during my time with Dead Rising 3.

More issues involve the game’s uses of the Kinect 2.0. Dead Rising 3 has a limited set of functions for the device, mostly utilizing the voice functionality to command following survivors. Unfortunately, these commands can be interpreted when you simply have people in the room. Numerous times people would be talking to me and suddenly the game would give a command to someone following me. This functionality is a nice thought, but without the Kinect being able to distinguish voices, it can misfire. Another imperfect use of the technology is when you try to knock zombies off of your vehicles and yourself. When zombies latch on to you, you are prompted by the screen to shake your controller. With, literally, thousands of zombies flooding your screen, getting grabbed is pretty commonplace. The problem is if you are leaning back on your couch or bed, your controller will not sync up with the Kinect, thus your shakes of the controller are not read correctly. At other times, it will ask you to press “B” or “X”. You never know if the controller is registering Kinect or not, so you are left shaking the controller when you should be pressing a button, or vice versa. It shows that while Kinect can be a great peripheral to use for games, it is still very much a work in progress.

While dealing with these bugs is not fun, killing zombies is, and if you are a fan the undead you may not need a narrative reason to push yourself forward. What kills the experience is that Dead Rising 3 allows you to play through the game so mindlessly, that the whole experience becomes rote long before you reach the end. Dead Rising 3’s core experience is solid, especially as you craft ridiculous weapons and vehicles. The problem is that once you get past the core mechanics, everything else in Dead Rising 3 is uneven at best. The cooperative mode lack incentive, the layout of the large map makes you retread the same roads too often, and the whole experience lacks any real challenge. These issues and the technical missteps hold Dead Rising 3 back from being a must-have game on the Xbox One.