Even with your new-found abilities, boss fights feel awkward and unfair. There's a very good game lurking inside of Dead Rising 3 - but it feels a little unsteady on its feet.įor all its innovation, Dead Rising 3’s bosses – both the mandatory storyline encounters and the Psycho missions – remain a frustrating low point. But the game's difficulty spikes - due to its control and inventory issues - and boring, stereotype-laden writing can be difficult to swallow. It presents a massive open world filled with possibilities and features the first truly impressive use of scale in a game based on a zombie outbreak. Kudos to Microsoft for securing a next-gen exclusive that neither overreaches nor underdelivers.ĭead Rising 3 gets a lot of things right.
But it's everything fans and newcomers alike could want from a launch-window sequel, holding to series tenets while never fumbling in its attempts to expand Dead Rising's core gameplay.
But a diamond it remains.ĭead Rising 3 is not the showcase game you'll use to stir up your friends' tech envy, nor is it the must-have software that will put the Xbox One over the top in the first round of the next-gen wars. In some ways it may even have tarnished it further. Capcom hasn't managed to clean the blood off this flawed diamond. Its problems, though many, are somewhat saved by all of the effortless fun had dicing up zombies with bizarre weaponry. It's a sloppy, loose and ugly looking game, lacking the finely tuned foundations of most games in their third iterations. In some ways Dead Rising 3 doesn't feel like a sequel at all. As a vehicle for that, it's a comfortable ride. It knows that all you really want to do is discover and create new playthings to dismember the undead. Just beware, once you get over the pleasure of the first few combo weapons, Dead Rising 3 is just a solid zombie brawler set in an open world, not the strange game of tender heart that used to be so funny and surprising.ĭead Rising 3 is a worthy entry in the series and, for the most part, gets out of your way. It's no kind of technical showcase for Xbox One, although that didn't really bother me once I got into it, and if all you want for a launch title is something passably entertaining to plug away at for a few long evenings, it will suit you fine. Dead Rising 3 is the weakest in the series, then.