At a loose gaming end of an evening I had a bit of a poke through a virtual pile of unplayed games. A Humble Bundle from a while back yielded Dead Rising 2 and 3, and I thought I’d start with the earlier game first but didn’t get terribly far. The graphics aren’t unplayably awful but show their age a bit, the controls are rather clunky, and save game checkpoints seemed few and far between making it a frustrating exercise. Moving on, Dead Rising 3 turned out to be a considerable improvement in all three areas. Describing it to Melmoth he said it sounded like Grand Theft Auto meets Evil Dead, which is indeed an excellent summary; hordes of zombies can be battered, sliced, shot, pummelled, toasted and shredded with a huge variety of weapons, and like Evil Dead 2 the gore and ultra-violence is so over-the-top it generally falls on the comedic side of grotesque. You can kit yourself out with Ash’s preferred chainsaw and shotgun, but one of the selling points of the series is the ability to combine items to produce weapons ranging from the sublimely ridiculous (Cement saw attached to a sledgehammer? Sure!) to the ridiculously sublime (A battleaxe with a speak n’ spell to provide sarcastic robotic commentary? You bet!)
Mowing down zombies in new and interesting ways gives experience points, and what do experience points make? Cuddly toys, of course (probably with a bunch of knives strapped to them). Also points to assign to various skills to improve your health, melee abilities, etc etc. There are various things to do around the city including assorted challenges to complete, cosmetic outfits to pick up, everything you’d want in an open world game. Co-op mode sounds fun, settings allow you to run an open game that anybody can drop into but I’m sticking with single player for now ’til checking there’s no potential for griefing (it’s quite tricky avoiding friendly NPCs when flailing around with a flaming katana/scythe hybrid, friendly fire could get rather messy).
There’s a story that so far is hitting a bunch of Standard Issue Zombie Beats (quarantined city, small group of survivors, sinister government/military threat, nasty human gangs posing the old ah-but-who-are-the-real-monsters question (it’s the first one, Rich)), but rather conveniently the game lets you replay previous chapters while retaining your character progression, so after advancing a couple of chapters quite rapidly I’ve rewound to spend a bit more time finding new and improbable weapon combinations before doing anything silly like trying to escape from a zombie-infested city.
Not sure it’s an all time classic, but an hour or two of zombie-bashing mayhem here and there isn’t a bad way of passing the time. Worth a look if you like the excesses of latter Saints Row games and always wanted to turn a parasol and dragon mask into a weapon of some sort.