Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster Review

Before I played this version of Dead Rising, I played the original in 2017 on PS4 and strongly disliked it. There was so much early game hell that made the game very offputting to a newcomer like me among other things I strongly disliked about it. When this Remaster got announced where it was including things like autosaving, a casual mode and generally made it easier to access for newcomers, I decided to look into it. I also played Dead Rising 4 a while back and I didn't think that game was really the trashfire it's made out to be by hardcore fans of the series either.

When playing Deluxe Remaster on normal, all the bad memories I had of the quirks of the original game came rushing back. The zombies grabbing you being based around RNG, the terrible survivor AI that feels like I'm babysitting children who don't even want to listen to me, the slow levels up that rely on you to rescue those said surivivors with terrible AI to get lots of XP, the terrible and awkward shooting mechanics only being slightly being better here, lots of bottlenecks where there is one reliable way back to the secruity room, and zombies always finding ways to spawning in the same spots despite me killing them over and over again.

Playing this on normal difficulty means I have to deal with this annoying stuff a lot more. Which is why I lowered to casual. Later in the game, I'm even more unashamed of my decision.

With casual mode, there's less need to rescue survivors and XP boosts happen faster so I'll be able to hold more weapons, take more damage and move faster. This now means getting through the zombie hordes and getting to story objectives is less of a tedious chore. The RNG for zombies grabs becomes less of a hassle to put up with. The same boring treks of getting to the secruity room the same way is over faster. The slightly better shooting and taking more HP, the late game third person shooting sections becomes much more bearable.

So what casual mode does is make DR's design choices more tolerable. On top of this, this remaster introduces the ability to fast forward time so now there's even less tedium.

If I can give the same some praise is at the very least the damage animations for killing zombies does provide some stimulus.

However, while the shooting controls are better here, I still wouldn't consider them good. You can move while aiming but it's way to slow to feel like it's something to be effective with.

This leads to another massive problem, which is the late game after "Ending A", you need to start dealing with firearm wielding mercenaries and it just highlights how bad the gunplay is and why I once again believe casual mode makes it tolerable. When you fire bullets at the mercs it takes a decent number of shots before they can be staggered. Enemies can stagger you much quicker with their shots. It esstentially becomes one big hitscan bullet tank battle where you keep tanking hits until you find healing items and maybe get some quick kills in with the rocket launcher. Casual mode gives you more HP so its easier to get away with more mistakes.

This is all while doing a series of fetch quests while getting from point A to B fighting the hitscan bullet tank battles with the mercs. This all culminates with a bizarre fist fight on top of a tank with some mercenary leader who just shows up a little bit before Ending A and barely had any presence throughout the game beforehand with an anticlimatic ending to top off everything after the terrible hitscan combat and fetch quests.

Almost all of the antagonists with the exception of Carlito Keyes and Russell Barnaby just randomly show up and then you kill them in one fight with them being "weird" and "quirky" being the sole character traits like the Cobra Unit from Metal Gear Solid 3.

Overall, this Remaster I didn't enjoy that much, I was only able to get to the end at all because of how accomadating casual mode was. Without it, I would've dropped again like I did in 2017.