REMAKES, a concept that has been popular not only in the world of TV shows and movies, but also games. When the creative studios are running out of ideas or maybe want to cash in on good old nostalgia, reviving old titles is a reliable way of guaranteeing fan interest and a likely good payout for a safe gamble. Get your old IP, give it a fresh coat of paint, maybe throw in a few extras, and off you go to market. In the world of videogames, we can also call them remasters, ports, and sometimes to our fears, re-imaginings. This is why we have our bigger publishers tend to give us a lot of it, some we’ve been asking for years, others we wonder why they bother. And that lands us with Capcom and another Remaster, a Deluxe Remaster, and that game is Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster.

 

 

Let me preface this by telling everyone that I have never played Dead Rising before, so the only frame of reference I really have when Capcom handed us this game would be whatever I would get from hearsay and my research. So comparing how controls are on the remaster versus the original release isn’t something I can comment on. And the only real reason I knew about Frank West before ever touching the game was thanks to Marvel Vs Capcom 3 and Kusoru taking Filipino Champ to school with it. Seeing that spectacle may have given me strange expectations as to what Frank West should be capable of.

Finally, firing it up for the first time after, I don’t know, 2 console generations? Tees me up for a shock with how the gameplay would be like. Where I would describe it as something between Ghosts and Goblins and older Castlevania games. Learning all the little secrets of where power-ups are or the best strategy to take down bosses is really where the bulk of your power spike as a player will come from.

 

 

However, this arcade game-like nature also gave it some pitfalls that made it harder for me to trudge on when the game presented some friction against what I wanted to do. It was almost like having to rewire what I’ve learned from more recent game design philosophies to be more accepting of what Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster was giving to me. And I generally walked away with an appreciation of the short journey it put me through.

So the big question hanging into balance is if Dead Rising really warranted a remaster when it had another HD port a bunch of years ago. Well, let’s break it down.

 

Production (4 / 5)

 

 

The first thing you’ll notice is the model of Frank West, who is noticeably younger looking in his original game, this time around he looks like he’s pushing 40. Probably a personal touch but I think it works, as his limited physical capability kind of matches the look. Speaking of looks, the facial expressions the characters make in the cutscenes are pretty great, at least for me. I mean, most of them have the case of the Nicolas Cage kind of acting, which makes sense for a time when you can’t be as subtle with your expressions given the limitations of technology at that time. They decided to not change any of that, the movement included.

Actually, yeah, the movement looks a bit strange and floaty, according to other people online, Frank West moved much more awkwardly in the original. So this is an improvement. But to be honest, the exaggerated awkwardness carries through on everything, from movement animations to acting in cutscenes. Is this a deal breaker? No, not really. I can give it some leeway considering it’s an older game, and considering the campiness of Dead Rising, the game feels more consistent. If there was anything I wish the models had more of, it would be a bit more blood and gore to match the non-stop zombie slaying you have to do.

 

 

The stage where you do all of this helps you be a bit more creative with how you go about the swinging down of our favorite undead army. Willamette Mall is full of variety in terms of shops that you can visit, check out, and find surprises in. However, if you’re rushing through zombie horde after zombie horde they will tend to kinda mesh together as one big place instead of several unique locations. This is because aside from landmarks, what you do in every place is more or less the same. You scrounge the place for whatever you can use while avoiding the unrelenting amount of zombies pouring through every possible door of the venue.

If there’s anything I would praise the visuals for, it would be how stably it ran on the PlayStation 5, never giving me issues with frame rate, maybe there were some unique model collisions because of how Frank West’s costumes are just too wacky to contain, but that’s about it.

The voicework sounds like they were rerecorded instead of simply being lifted from the old game, which I think translates seamlessly into the experience. The script will still feel dated, but I think stuff like that is part and parcel of a remaster experience.

I’m not particularly impressed with how the game looks or sounds, to be honest, but I think they did a good job. Apparently, they revamped a few things like the UI but somehow I still feel like the game is pretty dated.

 

Mechanics (3 / 5)

 

 

This is the point where I feel conflicted about Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster’s choices for how the game works, mainly how the control scheme works. And realizing that this control scheme is already revamped to be more accessible for newer and younger players is, well, painful. You can argue a lot of it is legacy, sure. But enjoying a game for its challenge is something I can differentiate from struggling with the controls it gives me. Frustrating and challenging can happen at the same time, but there were moments where frustration was much more prevalent during the experience.

For starters, let’s look at movement and combat. Movement is perfectly serviceable, as the updated controls make me feel right at home, heck there’s even a roll function which I do appreciate. But since there’s no such thing as melee attacks snapping to nearby targets, or locking onto them at all, the recovery from attack animations and attempting to hit enemies is something you have to learn. There are things like handguns and rifles that do make the boss encounters so much more convenient. Aiming them is simple enough and they work as intended, though could use some feedback to feel nice to use. You eventually catch on that there are several types of weapons you can wield and you have to figure out what each item is. Whereas the really good ones, such as chainsaws, are something you can’t carry around your inventory.

Speaking of inventory, carrying around items in Dead Rising was probably one of the more clunky parts of the game. You get to carry a limited amount of items, where you cycle through which one is active in Frank’s hands. Simple enough, right? The annoying part is there’s no way to organize them, it might have been nice to be able to lock or reorder them so you’re not switching what you have in the order you pick them up. It’s an action game so being able to access items reliably is going to be a big deal. There were several occurrences where I ended up on a book or a healing item when I was trying to switch to another weapon, or just generally switch to the wrong item. I know Capcom has already had many ways of handling inventory management, and I think it would have been a good idea to adapt something similar for this title. Because there were too many times when I thought I had switched to the hunting rifle, only to discover I was holding a book or a mallet instead.

 

 

Last and not least part of the action would be the zombies themselves, there’s a good variety of them in both looks and function and the one thing I do have an issue with is their grab range. Or speed, which may have me shout out: “I don’t know how the heck I got grabbed by them! What the heck is this 1 frame start-up I have to deal with!?” But as soon as I learned that jump spamming seemed to be the way around them, this became less and less of an issue. The logic that you can’t be grabbed when you’re airborne is very much a fighting game trope, and it fits that Capcom works with this logic, just if I didn’t have that sort of background, I’m not sure how you were supposed to learn that.

Progressing your character, meaning leveling them up, in Dead Rising is all about gaining PP, which can be done through achievements, slaying zombies, psychopaths, and well, taking nice pictures. The concept of taking photos either for horror, drama, laughs, or whatever moment or picture-worthy idea you get in front of you is quite novel for an action game. I went to some effort trying to get great outtake photos since they were honestly one of the harder ones to produce. Photo mode being accessible at all times with a press of a button was definitely a great decision since this is what made the gameplay feel more unique. You’re no longer Frank West, a generic action character that whacks away at countless zombies telling people to “get to the choppa” as you heroically save the day. No, you are Frank West, photojournalist extraordinaire, stuck in a convention hall full of zombie cosplayers! Who can certainly hold his own against active threats, he’s covered wars you know? But please stay ignited and on fire for just a few more seconds because the photo’s going to look great.

 

Content (4 / 5)

 

 

Going to the mall seems like a rather rudimentary choice for looking for places to go to and things to do. And I’d have to say aside from maybe some key locations, they generally feel the same. There are large open areas that have zombies falling out of every possible window or doorway you can find, where you’ll visit shops for items you can use or run around to find people you can rescue. I’m very much simplifying it but this is the bulk of what you’ll be doing, all this while working within the time restrictions of Dead Rising.

You see, the primary mode of the game is 72-hour mode, where 5 minutes of playing equates to about one hour for the in-game clock. This is important because of the linear nature of the game, you’ll be up against deadlines and you have to finish tasks or be at certain places by a certain time if you want to be able to proceed. Imagine having to walk a dog and you think you’ll have just enough time to get back and receive a delivery to your doorstep. And then for whatever reason your dog refuses to move, encounters a squirrel, or the leash snaps away. These little incidents chip away at your time and possibly your sanity as you’re trying to keep your schedule on time. This is the very experience I have with trying to rescue survivors while I still have very limited knowledge of the game. And once you lose them, they’re gone for the entire playthrough. Survivors can be quite stressful to take care of as you try to get through the horde of zombies, and apparently, the AI has been tweaked to make them move better and get targeted less. Certainly, that wasn’t my experience with the Boss Encounters. Considering the game can be finished within a day, playing do-overs or repeating because the game from the very beginning is built into the system, carrying over some progress like the photos you’ve taken from before and Frank’s level. So it ideally won’t take you too long to get back to the point that you want to try again. Also, the remaster gives us the very convenient auto-save feature that makes back-tracking so much less painful to do.

 

 

Bosses in this game are called psychopaths and are probably the highlight of the game. Unfortunately for those who are looking for a 1-to-1 remaster of the game, there are a bunch of changes across the title, bosses included. I wasn’t aware of any of them since I never played the first game, but if you’re a fan, do be informed that this is the case. Still, they’re quite the colorful cast of characters, from a guy who loves his grocery store, to a cult leader, to a war veteran, and even a deranged police officer. Clearly, there are a few more that I may have missed, but finding them and fighting them are what I’d say are what makes exploring the mall worthwhile. They also make me realize why they’ve decided to keep the controls rather limited and still close to its PlayStation 3 counterpart.

See, if the controls made melee attacks snappy and easy to aim with. If I could maybe dash, then jump-slide around a corner while aiming a gun like how you’re expected to in many modern shooters these days, it would completely outclass the attacks of the bosses you have to fight. All of them generally run around and make sweeping attacks at you. I can already roll through most of them. If I can animation cancel a roll into an attack that snaps toward the nearest target, I might as well be playing an auto-battler. But that’s also another subject in itself, why weren’t the boss moves updated? I think if they had a better move set, they’d become far more memorable. But if you’re revamping so much about the game, why not just make a new one, right? This argument is fair, but we can look at the Resident Evil remakes, and all I can think is “See? They CAN do it!” They’ve gone so far as to reskin so much of the game already, so why not just give Dead Rising the full remake treatment, anyway? Well, I’m already looking at this past reviewing the game itself, so maybe I’ll get back to this another way. 

 

 

Dead Rising’s style of content can be overwhelming the first few times you play, and as you learn and memorize item placements, the schedule of events including people you have to fight or save, and compounding that with how you get to keep your level between playthroughs, you do feel more and more invincible and capable of tackling the game, that is, if you’re willing to give it the time and patience it needs for you get there. Getting from point A to B is probably one of my largest qualms about the title, especially when carrying several survivors to the safe area. I was expecting that maybe you’d get an easier way of getting around the mall, including getting people to safety. I honestly thought that’s what the maintenance tunnel would give me so I just trudged on through even if I was failing many side-objectives left and right. Only to discover that no, there will be no easier way to get around when rescuing survivors as the tunnel is yet another pit full of zombies. This was one genuine disappointment I had with Dead Rising, realizing that I’m probably never going to get to that ridiculous version of Frank West in Marvel Vs Capcom 3. It was at this point I thought that maybe, making more playthroughs wasn’t going to be fun for me.

 

 

 

Aside from the New Game+ quite literally being baked into how to play the game, it includes two other modes of play. Over Time mode is basically another ending that you get to play out after the initial 72 hours of the game, and then there’s Infinite Mode that’s gonna make you go up against not only the zombies, but every other survivor in the mall, testing to see just how far you can go. So basically you get bonus game modes.

Apart from that you get a huge offering of alternate cosmetics to wear, where they have matching BGM for the mall, to boot. These cosmetics are well-realized, where my favorite would be Megaman Exe, as the material for the costume well, makes it look like Frank is quite literally cosplaying the character. You can even dress Frank as Ashely from Resident Evil 4, a Clicker, or Ken Masters from Street Fighter, it’s quite a lot to choose from! Provided of course that you’re willing to pay for the little add-ons, which are considerably cheap. Of course, you can hold on to that and simply get other cosmetics you get through playing the game.

 

Conclusion

 

 

Shaun of the Dead is a 2004 movie about a colorful cast of characters being stuck in a mall during a zombie apocalypse. And quite literally, I think of Dead Rising as the game version of that movie. While yes, I did go through some rough patches learning how the game is played, once I got the swing of things, I felt like I could breeze through any section of the mall.

Dead Rising tends to be opaque, forces you to do things the hard way, and you’ll eventually figure out what works for you. On one end, it can be frustrating when you’re still trying to figure it out. But once you’re past that, exploring the mall for more and more things to find does become tempting. Still, the methods of how the game tries to teach you things, and the style of gameplay may need a certain amount of patience. That could make curious people hesitate to pick it up. However, the price tag of 50 USD does make it a bit easier to consider.

With rather generous offerings, I would recommend this as a nice game to play in the theme of the Halloween season. A rather campy, comical, and sometimes clunky game that brings its own unique flavor to the zombie genre. Particularly for those who are already fans of the series, for those who are curious or not quite sure yet, I could recommend holding back on it until it comes up on sale. What really holds me back from recommending this to everyone is how this seems like a halfway to a remake, and I think it should’ve just gone all the way.

 

 

Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster can be good at the right moments, scoring a 4 / 5.

Available on PS 5, XSX, and PC.