During the nineteen hour run to its conclusion, Dead Rising 3 crashed over one hundred times. The game’s inability to operate with the slightest degree of basic functionality wasn’t a simple technical shortcoming, but rather a comprehensive failure that comes to damage and define every aspect of its experience. Looking back on Dead Rising 3, I’m not thinking of open-world mayhem under the stress of a cataclysmic time crunch, but the ugly and sudden halt of everything I found enjoyable in the intended game (NOTE: see update at the end of the proper review).
My PC exceeds the recommended system requirements. My NVIDIA drivers are up to date. Dead Rising 3 repeatedly crashes at high settings and low settings. It crashes with VSYNC on and VSYNC off. It crashes in areas with hundreds of zombies and it crashes in areas with no zombies. It crashes during missions, cut-scenes, boss fights, and car chases. Sometimes it crashes right after it starts. It’s been demonstrating similar faults for other reviewers, a legion of forum-goers, and technical performance specialists. Technically speaking, Dead Rising 3 appears to be suffering from a myriad of problems. It’s quite a shame, considering how many good ideas it’s keeping behind a wall of frustration.
There’s nothing quite like Dead Rising. The first two games (and the veritable remix of the second game) were known as zombie beat ’em up, lauded for their technical abilities, celebrated for their routine insanity. Dead Rising’s Frank West was a fat, balding grunt with a penchant for photography, and Dead Rising 2’s Chuck Greene was a former stuntman with the ability to combine unrelated objects into absurd instruments of death. Both characters and their respective abilities made Dead Rising feel like a series functionally uninterested in what its peers were doing.
Past the veneer of its genre, however, Dead Rising was actually a curious open-world that challenged the player to efficiently manage their time while they worked to rescue survivors, complete absurd errands, and fight off psychopaths – all in the name of building up stats and meeting the arduous requirements to save the day. Dead Rising came to be known as a difficult mechanical showpiece, a modern interpretation of the preposterous context and systems-heavy tone that defined classic Japanese games.
Dead Rising 3 aims to enhance and refine ideas that came to define the previous two games. Gone is the enlarged shopping mall setting, and in its place is a densely packed but meticulously constructed urban city of Los Perdidos. The intense time crunch that served as a dividing line between Dead Rising’s friends and foes has been severely extended, almost to the point of being completely irrelevant. Rescuing folks and going through absurd lengths to drag them back to the base is gone entirely. Psychopaths, chaotic boss fights that often required considerable trial and error, are now weaker and (almost always) optional. It seems that every point of contention has been dulled in favor a more directed and welcoming experience.
In opening Dead Rising 3’s appeal, the developers at Capcom Vancouver neutered some of its charm. The things that I liked about Dead Rising were clearly not the same things that a larger audience enjoyed, and the game was reinterpreted to better suit different needs. It’s not a reach to think about the transition made from Jet Set Radio to Jet Set Radio Future, where Smilebit produced a less demanding game as a way to address assumed shortcomings. In other words they tried to fix what wasn’t broken, and traded delicate mechanics for a smoother, more accessible experience. There’s still a decent payoff and both games remain fun, but the highs are never quite as high (and, obliging the gamble, the lows aren’t as low either).
Dead Rising 3’s open embrace of greater accessibility isn’t entirely without its bright spots. Managing inventory through an assortment of consumable health items and weapons susceptible to breaking was tough enough, and having to go back through and reacquire weapon parts after they broke down was a tedious enterprise. Dead Rising 3 introduces a weapon locker that’s available at any of the hideouts stashed throughout Los Perdidos. Anything you pick up or make is automatically added to your locker. There’s a recharging meter inside the locker governing how much you can take at one time, but generally this works as a great solution to the inevitable grind for item creation.
The very act of item creation has also seen a healthy boost. Dead Rising 3 offers all of the old favorites, like boxing gloves with Wolverine-like razorblades, but layers on a treasure trove of new and interesting combinations. Making a power-packed Dragon Punch requires boxing gloves and a motorcycle engine, whereas building an infant-bomb thing called an Acid Toy needs a toy robot and chemicals. Doubling down, certain weapon creation blueprints even call for combinations of combinations of combinations, as lovingly demonstrated by the Grim Reaper, the Death Mask Reaper, and the Ultimate Grim Reaper, respectively. Vehicles can even be hacked together and combined, as I found great use of the Party Slapper, which combined a party van with a street-cleaning truck. With tons of blueprints to find and endless paraphernalia littered through Los Perdidos, Dead Rising 3 throws heavy support behind psychotically responsible zombie genocide.
Functionally, Los Perdidos also serves as a step up from Dead Rising’s shopping mall and Dead Rising 2’s, uh, bigger shopping mall. A city reeling from a zombie infestation is subject to countless blockades and incredible hoards of the undead, each stifling the player’s movement throughout the city. Vehicles work while they last, and there’s always another one nearby when it gets destroyed. There’s also a healthy amount of verticality spread across all four of Los Perdidos’ objective areas; clever hopping across rooftops or investigating concealed stairwells typically yields positive results. In a way the tight enclosure and gross assortment of thematic stores makes Los Perdidos still feel like a classic Dead Rising shopping mall, just better spread out over wider geography.
Basic progression also seems to have better, more identifiable flow. Required missions push the story along, while nearly every mission dealing with rescuing survivors is optional. Occasionally you’ll stumble upon a survivor out in the wild who just needs to you to kill everything in sight, allowing them to be on their way, but most actual side missions have some substance. I ran a footrace across the burning and infested streets of Los Perdidos’ Ingleton district. I found an older lady and escorted her back to all of her favorite locations one last time. I stumbled upon a guy who liked eating zombie meat and set out to acquire rotting limbs for him. Most side missions amount to little more than fetch quests, escorts, or tasks to kill everything in sight, but the ridiculous context they’re encased in is enough to make them enjoyable.
What I could have done without was Dead Rising 3’s instance that cross-dressers and female bodybuilders somehow represent societal deviants that require extermination. Dead Rising 3’s psychopaths are intended to represent the worst of society, and I’ll grant you that these people all seem to be shitty on top of their fringe presentation, but at that point why even poke fun at lifestyle choice that’s in the midst of gaining wider acceptance? It’s hard to take anything in Dead Rising 3 seriously, and I’m not saying it has an agenda because it makes fun of a considerable variety of stereotypes, but it does feel a little gross in 2014.
I chose to experience Dead Rising 3 as a solo adventure. Many of the people you rescue can later be called upon to go out there and wreck zombies at your side, but I neither found that necessary nor attractive. The game is actually quite easy, especially if you’re sporting a pulse rifle and a Death Mask Reaper at all times. Cooperatively play also received a lot of attention, and combo vehicles are clearly designed for two simultaneous operators, but that wasn’t what I was looking for with the game.
It’s also worth mentioning that Dead Rising 3 sports a Nightmare Mode for Dead Rising enthusiasts (like me). Nightmare Mode retains your player level, but knocks the available days down from seven to three, greatly increases the speed at which time passes, bumps the difficulty, and restores bathrooms as the only hard save points. I gracefully made my way through Dead Rising 3-proper with plenty of time left on the clock and barely a scratch on me, so Nightmare Mode will serve as a means to restore what I found lacking in the proper campaign.
We’ve made it this deep in the review without mentioning Dead Rising 3’s story or even the name of its protagonist (it’s Nick). While the game sports some impressive callbacks to previous titles and individual anecdotes learned through rescuing survivors, its narrative wrapper is kind of weak. I found the conspiracy fueling its intentions to be kind of dull, and as character Nick felt like some random guy. It’s not necessarily bad, just inconsequential and not really equipped to add much to the experience.
Being the Apocalypse Edition of Dead Rising 3, the PC release also sports all of the downloadable content formerly offered through Dead Rising 3’s season pass. Four unique pieces of content place control behind for other significant players in Los Perdidos’ tale. In the interest of disclosure I made it a half-hour through Adam Kane’s installment before Dead Rising 3 issued one of its system crashing bugs. I was in the middle of a mission where I had to eliminate a hundred or so zombies inside of a large area, and quite frankly I had had it with Dead Rising 3’s technical impotence at that point. I made it through the core game having to repeat an obscene amount of content, and I didn’t intend to do that again with extra content.
It’s a sad state, but that’s really what it comes down to with the PC version of Dead Rising 3. It’s an interesting game, one that may not be as aggressively designed as its predecessors, but still functionally unlike any of its open-world peers. Unfortunately it’s not worth the insane amount of crashes that occur over the course of a normal game. Every idea it brings to the table, every opportunity to get lost inside its wild world is compromised by unforgivable technical bugs. Dead Rising 3 literally won’t let you play it.
Update – 9/9/14 – Capcom is actively working toward solutions to smooth out the play experience of Dead Rising 3. An all-encompassing patch hasn’t been issued yet, but there are a few suggestions for those experiencing the same crash error I did. They’re available at the Steam forums here, and the solution that helped my specific crash issues involved turning off the “Shader Cache” option on my NVIDIA control panel. After playing Dead Rising 3 for another couple of hours, this didn’t completely fix the problem, but it did greatly reduce the frequency of crashes. It’s a bit of an odd work around, but it’s the best option available until an inevitable patch. — Eric Layman
