Next Gen gets even next-genner.
When it first appeared last year as an Xbone launch title, the third instalment in Capcom’s rather stupid Zombie slaughtering franchise, stood out as one of the few games that appeared to actually be designed for the hardware inside so called ‘next gen’ consoles.
This meant moving the game out of fairly confined areas into a proper open world, populated by a higher density of Zombies than ever before, taking full advantage of the souped up AMD netbook processor that lay under the hood of the console.
All of this laid the groundwork for an even more impressive PC version, and finally it has arrived in the form of the Apocalypse Edition of the game. This takes the base title and adds four pieces of DLC that were released for the Xbone, which are comprised of additional chunks of playable content and a bunch of unlockable costumes and items.
Much like the previous games, the story mode introduces a new protagonist, a mechanic named Nick Ramos, from the fictional Californian city of Los Perdidos. Set ten years after the first game, the game starts three days into a Zombie outbreak and involves trying to escape before a military airstrike hits the city in six days time.
This makes for a much more forgiving time limit than previous iterations of the franchise, which were very much titles focused on racing against the clock. This loosening seems to be a direct side effect of the open world nature of the game – if too strict a timer was imposed then players would be completely unable to do anything other than follow the main path, thus negating the time and effort put into broadening the game’s environments.
This doesn’t mean that Capcom has completely changed the way the game plays out. You still have to wade your way through hordes of Zombies to get anywhere, your weapons are still annoying in their fragility and the game is still designed with its tongue firmly in cheek. The additions to the game are designed to take the core concepts of the franchise and expand them outwards to fit the larger environment – the game has now added drivable vehicles, which not only make it easier to get from place to place (mowing down the zombie hordes along the way of course), but like weapons they can be combined to form newer, more outlandish vehicles designed to take zombie killing to silly new heights.
Refreshingly, Capcom has gone back to the drawing board on a few key things. The first is character levelling, which means that increased health and inventory space can be unlocked with points rather than being reliant on hitting certain levels. It has also removed the need to find a workbench to mod weapons, which has a flow on effect of reducing the frustration involved in making them. No longer does it involve the needless busywork of filling your limited inventory with components, find a bench and bolt them together – now you can do it on the fly and not have to dispose of your useful weapons just to ferry parts.
Vehicle creation is similar, get two compatible vehicles together and assemble them anywhere while ignoring the logical inconsistencies of extreme vehicle modding in the midst of shambling zombie hordes.
While there is no doubt that Dead Rising 3 is bigger than its predecessors in every way, it ultimately suffers from the same love or hate response that they engendered. After a while the endless wading through zombies in order to get anywhere can be tiresome, and the sheer fragility of weapons soon stops seemingly like an interesting gameplay mechanic and morphs into a source of frustration. There is a huge amount of sheer joy that can be derived by dragon punching your way into a vast packs of the undead with the weapon you just built from a set of boxing gloves and a lawnmower engine, but it is often shortlived once the weapon falls apart midway through said zombie packs.
Levelling aspects of your character does increase weapon endurance, but things still break regularly enough for the game to regularly devolve into bouts of mindless busywork as you scramble to rebuild your arsenal over and over again. It is an annoyance that has come hand in hand with every title in the franchise that sadly persists.
Where the game really does shine is in its visuals, and the sheer scale of the zombie hordes occupying Los Perdidos. There are times when the numbers are so overwhelming that trying to fight is an exercise in sheer futility, and you are much better off running. The opening sequence of the game is one of these, clearly designed to make the jaws of Xbone owners drop when they fired the game up for the first time, a way for Capcom to scream WELCOME TO NEXT GEN in the least subtle of ways.
Ultimately, while the scope and visuals of Dead Rising 3 are a sight to behold, its worth comes down to whether or not you enjoy the inherent design of the franchise. Odds are that if you loved the previous titles then this will be right up your alley, if they frustrated then we’d suggest looking elsewhere for your Zombie killing kicks. JOHN GILLOOLY