Dead Rising is probably one of the most influential games of my early teens. I think I rented it for a week, struggled with getting anywhere in it because of the god-awful, dated save-system and me not being mentally equipped enough to deal with the time pressure and making sure Frank has time to take a tinkle.
I came back to it a year later and rented it again then bought it outright, and it became probably one of my favourite games of the 360-era. It certainly wasn’t the best game I played that generation (Dead Rising 2 is a superior game in every aspect) but it is still one of my favourite games of that generation of gaming.
It wowed me – that many interactable zombies crowding the space was a marvel to me at the time. It had this natural tension of getting anywhere because of the shambling hordes, and to this day when I replay it I still have that same feeling of hesitance going to Al Fresco plaza because it’s always wall-to-wall packed with zombies. All packaged with a jovial, cheeky attitude and tone that would define the series to come.
Capcom is the reason my love for the zombie genre extends until this day, and they’ve been killing it with the RE:Makes. Dead Rising bucks the trend as it’s exclusively a remaster but it’s an exhaustive, total remaster. It’s not just upscaled textures running on an old engine patched to work on modern machines. It’s a new engine, with new voice actors, but with the same gameplay (and music!) as before.
All of the game now runs on the RE:Engine, and it does so pretty well. Dead Rising’s aesthetic is maintained with a lot of characters having exaggerated facial features which work well in the RE engine (which has struggled with rendering realistic faces without an uncanny valley effect.) It replicates the physics of the first game perfectly too. You jump weird, your speed is a little weird, you crash into things on a skateboard and car strangely… just how you did over 10 years ago. It’s great.
What isn’t a perfect copy feels like a deliberate choice which is mostly good.
You aren’t rewarded for taking creepy pictures of women anymore. Erotica as a genre you earn points for is entirely removed and forgotten about. It was juvenile and didn’t do much for the game. It can stay in an era where apparently it was acceptable enough to put in a mainstream title. Smaller things like not puking anymore when you eat rotten food or bad juice mixes have been taken out too.
Some Psychopaths have also undergone a redesign, specifically Cliff and Larry. Cliff’s dialogue was changed from him calling Frank a Vietnamese freedom-fighter and a ‘commie’ to instead implying you’re some kind of rat or mole in a war that is definitely still supposed to be Vietnam. Aside from that he stays the same – war veteran who went mad, he remains to be portrayed sympathetically and all that.
Larry on the other hand, the butcher you face late into the game, was an absolutely horrific racist caricature of south-east Asians. Missing his two-front teeth, morbidly obese, filthy and crusty uniform in an even crustier, grosser arena. It’s a vile, pretty brazen stereotype that was never ‘of the time’. It was always bad. It was always mean-spirited. It was always nasty.
Larry’s new design is still distinct, in the way Dead Rising’s psychopaths are. He’s still an obsessive butcher who wants to turn humans into ground meat (a not-so-coy commentary on the games themes of American consumption) but he looks like a real person now. His shop is clean, like he takes pride in his work (he’s obsessed with it after all) he’s still Asian, but he’s not a mocking caricature of an immigrant stereotype, and lastly he’s built like a brickshithouse instead of being just really fat.
I like it. It’s cool. I’m not going to praise them for fixing it though. It’s the bare minimum to ensure they fixed it, and they did. That’s good.
My favourite redesign overall belongs to the Raincoat Cult. They’re still super creepy but now they huddle in a mass and make a sign with their hands to mimic some kind’ve demon sign and it’s so cool and sinister.
Speaking of Psychopaths and gameplay changes in general – they are a pain in the ass to fight now. They deal way too much damage and I think it’s to compensate with how much more responsive the controls can be. I’ve played Dead Rising 1 recently and they didn’t hurt this much for sure.
Survivors remain as they always have been, largely useless. You can guide them better but they’re still cats you’re trying to herd. Sometimes they’ll point out secrets and bonuses to you if you give them their favourite snackies but that’s about it.
Controls feel great and modern, and no longer are you hitting multiple face-buttons while flicking your thumbstick about the place to perform simple moves. You can go back to that control scheme if you want, and I tried it, but it felt dated compared to the new scheme which was pretty seamlessly integrated.
Topping off the good is the addition that everyone now has a dedicated VA. It’s awesome hearing every bit of dialogue acted out, with more mid-battle dialogue from the survivors and Psychopaths too. It’s crazy to me Otis never had a VA in the original despite how much he talks to you over the radio.
Onto where it gets ugly, and for why I’ll say right now that this is not, to me, the definitive Dead Rising experience. All these changes are great, and good, but there’s a fundamental issue that needs either addressing or patching.
There’s barely any zombies around. Dead Rising Remake suffers from a massive issue with NPC pop-in. The RE:Engine makes this game look amazing but it’s struggling to have all these zombies on screen and it’s failing to load them in time. In areas where you’re traveling too fast (and not just like in a car, which you do rare enough) you’ll find them empty.
You’ll often find the game just doesn’t have time to spawn any in and you’ll just be nearly alone until you turn around and find there’s now 50 in a place you just looked at a second ago. It’s really frustrating because it totally kills my memories of the original and I can easily imagine a fresh player to the series trying this out and trying to figure out what exactly the hype was about.
There are areas in the game that should be packed with zombies, like the underground, and you’ll just often find them empty unless you make an effort to go slow to keep them spawning in. It sucks so hard.
They improved the game without changing it so much but they got the most crucial thing wrong. I had hoped it was a problem with my set-up but I had friends report similar things to me.
Should you buy this game? On sale, I’d say. I would recommend it wholeheartedly to fans of the original. If you wanted to experience Dead Rising for the first time I’d go buy the original Steam port and play that – racist caricatures and objectification are sins it bears, but the game is a classic for a reason. It’s of a time (and it wasn’t okay at the time nor should we ever think it was) where those things got published without critical thought into how it could be harmful. I would not blame anyone for not wanting to check out the original for those reasons alone.
If a patch comes out and fixes the pop-in issue, which I’ve been kind’ve waiting on for a week, then I’d call this a definitive way to experience Dead Rising. The article will be updated if and when that happens.
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