Frank West's return to Dead Rising will have you dreaming of a red Christmas.
The allure of the original Dead Rising’s goofy and gratuitous zombie slaughter was the reason I bought an Xbox 360 back in 2006. Dead Rising 4 ratchets that arcadey, hack-and-slash power fantasy and self-aware satire up to new heights. Even when technical issues rear their ugly heads, that feelgood loop of wading into the horde and coming out the other side has me feeling like a bonafide badass.
It’s no surprise, then, that Dead Rising 4 is the best incarnation of that satisfying and cathartic gameplay yet. It leans harder than ever into its ridiculous combo and weapon-crafting systems, but the core action gameplay, character progression, creative survival, and attitude are still very much central to this tale.
Frank West is the perfect delivery system for all of that. The cocky photographer’s return to the series after sitting out Dead Rising 2 and 3 is like being reunited with an old friend, despite his being voiced by a new actor. He’s still a wiseass, though he’s 16 years older and a little wiser; a wiserass, if you will. He might be the same self-important, sarcastic asshole with a heart of gold, but if Capcom set out to make Frank seem a little weathered with age, then it’s a job well done.
Capcom also absolutely nails the personality, the bizarre charm, and the Christmastime consumerism setting of the Willamette Memorial Megaplex. Holiday decorations adorn the mall and city, and that holiday vibe even extends into the game menus, which pipes out that good department-store Christmas jazz and the kind of rousing orchestral scores that swell when the kid and his family are reunited at the end of a feelgood holiday classic.
I’m impressed with the detailed presentation and careful consideration that went into both the world and the story. It would’ve been easy to go full slapstick with this ridiculous premise of yet another zombie outbreak, running down the same road that Saints Row took in later games in the series. But Capcom has balanced the absurdity with equal parts of intelligence and feeling. And for every trying-too-hard line of dialogue like, “Well, set my balls on fire,” that Frank blurts out, there’s a moment of wit or compassion or genuinely loveable buffoonery that becomes the antidote to the obnoxiousness.
And the quiet mystery at the heart of Dead Rising 4 is much more involved and compelling than it needs to be for a game that lets you tape a Segway to a golf cart to build a “Bogey Monster” death machine. There’s much more than a cut-and-dry “Oh no, the zombies are back,” plot at work here, with both callbacks to the original Dead Rising and characters that have more than one layer to them. Some of the ostensibly important relationships between characters end up failing to launch, which I found disappointing until several good secondary characters picked up the slack and turned out to be more than what they appeared.
Willamette, too, is more than it first appears to be. The open-world map is made up of the central Willamette Memorial Megaplex (the hulking Mecca of commerce that replaced the original Willamette Mall after the events of Dead Rising), but it’s also surrounded by the fully explorable neighborhoods and rural incorporations, and you can visit those as well. Every area is spread out just enough that it takes a short, deliberate effort to get there, but I prefer the zombie-smearing drive between neighborhoods over the mildly useful fast travel system between shelters and the mall.
Time to Kill
The biggest change Dead Rising 4 makes to the traditional Dead Rising formula is the removal of the countdown timer that forced you to rush through objectives and make tough calls to bypass potentially interesting side objectives, negating that sense of urgency earlier games did well. But I found I didn’t miss it much because there’s too much to see, and do, and squish to be satisfied by just 72 in-game hours, as we had in the original. There’s an exhausting number of collectibles and weapon blueprints to find, side mysteries to uncover and solve through investigations, and hidden graffiti art to photograph. Now you’re free to meander, explore, and get lost in this larger, denser version of Willamette.
One example of things I was glad I didn’t have to miss are the spontaneous events that spring up from time to time, giving you the opportunity to destroy some communication equipment belonging to the paramilitary bad guys, or rescue a survivor that will go toward upgrading the nearest shelter. Those missions punctuate the endless sea of undead and give welcome structure to wandering through Willamette, even if they only take a minute or two to complete.
On the subject of the shelters, I felt underwhelmed by that system in Dead Rising 4. Each shelter is mostly just a hub for vendors to sell you combo weapons and vehicles, alongside maps that mark the location on collectibles on your minimap. They’re useful, but I would’ve loved to see some sort of shelter defense system come into play. These safehouses are just a little too safe.
In any case, every collectible you find has real benefit: currency, experience, training manuals, or even just additional context and backstory. There’s incentive for exploring and scavenging, or more realistically getting pleasantly sidetracked for hours at a time, and that activity pads out the roughly 10-hour main storyline. By the time I finally finished the story, I had over 25 hours played, 20,000 zombies killed, and I was nowhere close to hunting down everything I wanted to find. (New Game+ mode gives you the opportunity to go back, though there’s no post-game free-roam mode.)
Continues
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