Eighteen years after the original, Capcom is heading back to the mall that started it all with Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster. Should players pack their bags for Willamette?
Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster Review
Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster begins with players flying into a town in the middle of a lockdown. You play as Frank West, a freelance journalist looking for his next big scoop. As you fly in and start taking pictures, you quickly find out things are not looking good.
Zombies have taken the town over, and survivors are meeting up at a mall. Looking for answers, you drop at the mall to see what you can figure out. Things quickly get bad when an old woman opens up the front doors and lets the horde of zombies in.
Retreating back to the security room, you begin to put pieces of what happened together. Some sort of outbreak occurred, and people started biting each other, making it spread even faster. Now, you are stuck here for the next 72 hours until your chopper comes back to pick you up.
In the meantime, you search for answers, help survivors get to safety, and, of course, kill zombies and crazy people. Overall, with the campaign and the post-game content, you are looking at about 20 hours of action.
Things are pretty simple – at least, when you start. All you have to do is kill some zombies and help people out. You can think of zombies in the game like cannon fodder. I had over 3,000 kills by the end of my playthrough, and you could easily get higher if you use cars to run them over.
They are fun to kill and a great way to test new weapons or get photo ops. When night comes, though, you need to watch out. Zombies become way more aggressive, and their damage can add up. If you get taken down and bit, you lose three HP. Note that the early game only has five HP to start; add the Psychopaths into the mix, and things get tricky.
The Psychos are the game’s mini-bosses, and you typically need to kill them to progress on the main story or to rescue other survivors. You get EXP by killing zombies and Psychos, but the big points come from bringing back survivors.
On top of that, you have a limited amount of time to deal with the crazies and rescue people before they either die or escape—pressure on top of pressure in this game. I think it’s possible to save everyone in your first playthrough if you time it correctly, but I definitely didn’t. I was too busy messing around with the games and copious amounts of weapons.
Anything you can see in this game that you can pick up can be used as a weapon. Benches, gumball machines, swords, bloody hands, teddy bears, bats, chainsaws, and frying pans are just a few of the weapons you can find in the game.
From what I’ve been told, the blue chainsaw was broken in the original game, and it still is here. That thing wrecks zombies and crazies alike, and if you get the Blade book, it will last way longer. There is just one problem with there being so many weapons and books to pick up: your inventory space is super limited at the start.
When you start the game, you can only hold five items, which isn’t enough when you have dozens of toys you can pick up around you. You can hold more as you level up, but even then, you are always picking and choosing between weapons, healing items, and books to keep your weapons stronger. Even in the end, I only had a couple of free extra spaces. The little blue chainsaw that the Clown Pyscho drops is still powerful, so I recommend using that once you get it; just make sure you have the Blade book to make it last longer.
There are some annoyances still in the game. The Psychos in the Jeep respawn still, so you have to kill them over and over or ignore them. The survivor AI can also still be very hit-and-miss. They will listen, but they get caught up on objects and zombies quite often.
Some of the Psychopaths have not aged very gracefully either. It was always a bit weird, but now it’s pretty cringe. Other than that, I didn’t have any bugs or crashes.
While the changes are minimal, Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster’s shambling undead have never looked better. Fans of the original and newcomers alike will find plenty of zombie-slaying fun.
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Overall – 80%
80%
Official Score
While the changes are minimal, Dead Rising Deluxe Remastered shambling undead have never looked better. Fans of the original and newcomers alike will find plenty of zombie-slaying fun.