Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster Review - CD Mixtape
Just about the first thing that Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster (neatly abbreviated as DRDR) does is to ask players their age. There is no stated purpose for this (*cough* data collection *splutter*), but it sure as hell serves as a punch-in-the-face reminder of the passing of time. While I was legally an adult when Dead Rising first released on the then-cutting-edge Xbox 360, I was still youthful enough to live in denial of it. Today, however, people who weren’t yet born when Capcom released the original may well be adults come Christmas. All excuses for denial are fading away in the rearview mirror.
This comes as a roundabout way of stressing that Dead Rising is an old game. How old? To put it into perspective, around about the same time it was originally released, I picked up a copy of Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance re-release of the original The Legend of Zelda. The NES game represented there was, on that day in the latter end of 2006, only a single year older than Dead Rising is at the time of my writing this.
This specific comparison is important because, as someone who grew up as a Sega kid, I had never played the original Zelda before. It was a classic to the point of being an embarrassing omission from my childhood, but boy was I about to meet disappointment head-on. Stripped of any nostalgic charge, the game proved to be borderline unplayable. Link moved stiffly on a strict four-way axis. Attacks were unresponsive. Damage taken frequently seemed unfair. Playing it felt like trying to chew gum while suffering from lockjaw like trying to eat raw meat as a person who is used to… I dunno… cooking. Still, I had sunk money into that cartridge, and I tried almost desperately to like it, but with no fond memories to help transport me back, I was left with a game that had since been bettered and that, for all its significance, was no longer good by any metric that I could measure it.
You can probably see where this is going. To put it upfront and bluntly: I didn’t love my time with DRDR. While perhaps not to the same degree that the original Zelda did in 2006, it certainly feels clunky when played with fresh hands. To Capcom’s credit, some work was at least done here – it now looks like you might remember it looking, rather than what it (or, indeed, its first remaster) actually did, and things were loosened up to try and prevent newcomers from bouncing off of it. Checkpointing and saving is apparently more generous this time around, and certain combat encounters have been dialled back to more reasonable requirements.
I’m sure that the humblebrag gatekeepers will absolutely loathe these concessions, but for the most part, judged as a simple remaster, Capcom has done fine work here. It’s kind of cruel that all this doesn’t mean that I have to like it.
A big part of the problem here is that you can massage the size of health bars all you want, add as many checkpoints as you like; these things are just bandages slapped over a wound. Not that those who still carry scars from when the original got its hooks into them in the early heyday of the XBox 360 will be bothered by this. They bring with them memories of being amazed at the sheer number of zombies on screen, of the (admittedly cool, on its own terms) crazy insanity of this idea for a game finding its way all the way through pitching, development and onto store shelves. As a remaster of a game that a person has fond memories of, for most of you DRDR is arguably a no-brainer.
Perhaps I should take a step back, though, and establish the basic story and gameplay premise for the uninitiated. Players take control of one Frank West (redesigned from the original, now apparently having aged along with the original game), a freelance photojournalist who is looking for his big break but also apparently has the funds to charter a private helicopter.
The reason for this chartering? A fictional town in Colorado has gone strangely quiet, and after Frank lands atop a large shopping mall, it becomes apparent why: a textbook case of a small-town zombie outbreak. Frank is then left with three days (the game operates a real-time clock with objectives running to deadlines; it is indeed possible to fail if you take too long to complete a key one) before his pilot returns to pick him up. During this time, players are tasked with taking photos, uncovering the source of the outbreak, trying to rescue survivors trapped in different stores… and (re-)murdering a whole swathe of zombies with whatever weapons – real or makeshift – can be found around the mall.
It’s all openly, gleefully silly (the zombies only get through the initial barricades on the mall because an old lady is trying to rescue her tiny dog) and is, quite honestly, a pretty damn cool premise for a videogame. Leaning in hard to being as ridiculous as possible was absolutely the right decision in 2006, and it remains as such today. It’s just a shame that those old joints are starting to feel pretty stiff.
It’s difficult not to expect that the people who loved the original back in the day will be delighted by DRDR, in no small part because of all those reviews that were posted around the same time my own code had finished downloading. The high probability of Dead Rising potentially delighting most of its existing fanbase (aside from those who wish that this one might stay a bit more sexist, perhaps) while nonetheless being largely unfit for a fresh audience in the current day is baked into a key aspect of its design.
Dead Rising isn’t a roguelike. No exactly. Nonetheless, eliciting that genre is nonetheless a helpful way to think about it. While the idea isn’t exactly made explicitly clear right away, when in the menus players may discover that their play session is described as a ‘run’; when they finish the main story, they will learn more explicitly that they get to keep all of their levelling for a fresh one. For me, if my PS5’s dashboard is to be believed, this took around 20 hours. The true joy of Dead Rising, then, comes in the form of increasingly powered-up runs once everything is more familiar.
A part of this empowerment is more apparent when you separate Dead Rising from the more typical characteristics of a roguelike, most notably short runs and procedurally generated spaces. 20 hours is not a short run*, and the mall that serves as the setting – along with items both key and incidental – is consistent between runs, rather than procedurally generated. What this means is that, in a sense, simple knowledge and experience plays a not insignificant role to a second or third playthrough, possibly comparable to elevating Frank’s various stats. There are entire variations on the typical roguelike formula that rely almost exclusively on this.
In other words: players coming into DRDR completely fresh are, to a certain extent, playing a different game to those revisiting a favourite from nearly two decades ago. This has made slapping a score on the end of this review a particularly confounding task, as it really feels like the grade could change run to run, likely inching slightly higher each time. The question I’ve had to settle with answering is quite simply this: was the 20-or-so hour chunk of life that I spent getting to the point where I may have a more informed and enjoyable playthrough a price worth paying? Personally, I don’t think so – heaven knows, I so badly wished I could be playing something else for much of this. I suspect that many people will feel similarly.
I still shiver when I think about the first time I finally managed to rescue one of the civilians trapped in the mall, bring them back to the safety of the rooftop bunker. By this point I had learned that, so long as you keep moving, you can generally keep Frank safe from the grasp of the hundreds of zombies that litter each location. This is imperfect, however, and leads to what gradually becomes a frustrating number of interruptions – more so when you have another civilian (or two or ten) in tow.
Eventually, however, I got to the elevator leading to the safe room. Naturally, it was packed with zombies. At this point, Frank’s health bar was dangerously low, but I managed to clear them out and ride up to the roof… only to find that my companion must have been just outside the range wherein the game would recognise them as being with me. Frustrated, I turned to open the elevator I had just stepped out of.
It was full of zombies. Again. They had just spawned in there. In the quite literal space of about a second. Get absolutely fucked, Dead Rising.
As least you get more than one save slot in DRDR. You could literally save yourself between a rock and a hard place in the original.
Eventually, I would learn that if you run into the elevator and just spam the button to go up then it will get you to the roof no matter how many undead are crammed in there. This helped a lot, but players shouldn’t be required to figure out how to cheese systems just because the systems were cheesing them first.
This is just compounded by the combat simply not feeling good. To a certain degree, this makes sense – we’re talking about swathes of stupid zombies here, not a handful of smarter enemies that need to be surgically targeted. And Frank is a photojournalist, not a soldier. But even within these parameters, it just feels inexplicably cumbersome. The joy of picking up and swinging around a rest bench dissipates pretty quickly when such wide swings still miss easy targets that result in cheap-feeling moments of failure. As he progresses through the story, rescues survivors and takes photos that meet certain criteria, Frank does level up and learn new abilities, but execution of them seldom lives up to the descriptive promise.
The absolute worst part is the ‘psychopaths’; elongated boss-like battles that mostly lack unique or fun solutions and are generally just damage sponges that Frank is required to outlast. Apparently these are dialled-back from the original, but I suspect that this just relates to the level of damage dealt – most of these encounters are presented with a promising off-kilter charm, but ultimately turned out to be mechanically tedious garbage. And if you happened to wander into one unprepared with a stash of healing items ready? Sorry, first-timer. That’s just your fault for a lack of clairvoyance.
In general, there’s just a lack of feedback. Combat seldom feels satisfying unless you’re really wound up, and in general information is lacking. Being of its time, this is perhaos undestandable, if not enjoyable. More perplexing, especially considering Capcom’s pedigree here, is the sound design being bizarrely lacklustre. The general quiet of the mall and moaning of zombies has to be intentional, but everything is aggressively muted. One section of the shopping plaza has a small indoor roller coaster – it’s running, but it barely makes a sound. There is no echo of footsteps when Frank enters the underground parking. DRDR doesn’t have a soundscape so much as it does a series of muffled sound effects and it really stops the mall from ever really feeling like a place.
As frustrating as so much of my time with DRDR was, however, perhaps the most upsetting part of all is the simple knowledge that the premise here really does offer a silly good time. I can absolutely see why people are attached to it. As a game concept, it’s a crazy, wild swing that I applaud Capcom for taking. Playing back in the mid-late ‘00s must have been a buzz, too, seeing all of those zombies rendered on screen, and much of what feels idiosyncratic today was still just a part of many games back then.
This is why, I think, I bemoan the changes being a bandage. More save slots and more manageable bosses are nice for the newbies, but they serve to make things more manageable, not more enjoyable. I honestly found that DRDR just feels cumbersome to play, and that some of the rewards associated with multiple runs just as easily come off as punishments for the simple sin of being on the first one.
I legitimately hated a lot of my time with it. But, man, I do hope that a proper new instalment is in the works, because I can absolutely see how this could be gloriously delirious fun.
*To be fair, this time stamp also includes a couple of moments of reverting to earlier saves
Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster was reviewed on PS5, with a code kindly provided by Capcom.
