
For example, from time to time you will find new safe havens to clear of zombies, which frees the space up for survivors to move in and offer you clothes, maps, weapons, vehicles, and food for sale.ĭead Rising 4’s weapon and vehicle crafting system is more simple than in past games, letting you make new zombie-slaying tools whenever and wherever you want.

Instead, Dead Rising 4 relies heavily on hoarding the blueprints that allow you to make wacky homebrew weapons and tools to motivate you through its story and side quests.
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The timer does make a brief comeback in the game’s co-op multiplayer, in which up to four players take on varying missions that must be completed during minutes-long in-game “days.” At the end of each day you and your teammates have to get to a safe house, harking back to the earlier games, yet without much of the previous urgency.īesides a few uninspired unique goals like “take pictures of statues” most of the multiplayer missions amount to a remix of “kill X number of zombies with Y weapon,” plus boss fights every other “day.” The more missions you complete before you head to the safe house (which you have ample time to do once it opens up), the better your rewards, but there’s no punishment for not completing them, so there’s no tension.

Capcom might have pleased a wider variety of players had they provided the option to crank up the difficulty with a tight time limit, as it did in Dead Rising 3, but there’s no such option this time around.

Without it, the zombies are simply animated speed bumps, getting in your way but never stopping you.
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In the past, the series was always as much a race against time as it was a slog against zombies. The zombies were never meant to hold our attention on their own. Playing Dead Rising has become much less stressful since developer Capcom removed that timer element, but losing the timer has cost the game its purpose. Players can complete story missions, tackle side activities or simply churn through zombies at their leisure. And once again, it’s been decimated by the undead, this time during the controversial shopping holiday Black Friday.ĭead Rising 4 has eschewed the series’ signature countdown, which forced players to complete the story (and some of its optional missions) in a relatively short time, in favor of a more freeform open world experience. After 15 years, the city has erected a new, much larger shopping center in its place. The original Dead Rising‘s zombie outbreak was restricted to the local mall. Frank West, the series’ original protagonist, returns to the scene of the first game in the series: Willamette, Colorado. Relieving the tensionĭead Rising 4 wants to be a throwback to the series’ early days. Rather than full-fledged sequel, Dead Rising 4 feels like a nonsensical short story that falls way short of the campy writing fans have come to expect. The game, however, is unfortunately held back by its myriad technical problems, including a complete lack of endgame and half-baked multiplayer. Its raw, unfettered mayhem - its main draw - is the best the series has ever featured. Once again, Dead Rising 4 features some of the series’ best qualities, capable of sending a staggering number of zombies lurching your way. The core Dead Rising experience remains intact. But Dead Rising 4 will likely leave many of those fans feeling colder than a froze-solid zombie on Christmas. The Dead Rising series has earned a cult following because the technically impressive, campy carnage of its early entries scratched an itch few other games could.
