Dead Rising 3 (Xbox One)

After going multi-platform with Dead Rising 2 in 2010, the horror zombie survival series makes a return with a third game as an exclusive for Xbox One. Other titles in the genre, such as Resident Evil and Onimusha, typically limited you to a few locations, but the open-world nature of the Dead Rising series means that nowhere is safe from the zombie outbreak.

Time to survive

In Dead Rising 3, you play as a mechanic called Nick Ramos caught in the wake of a zombie outbreak in the fictional city of Los Perdidos. The goal is to survive by any means necessary, and that means taking on missions to get better weapons and supplies.

The infested metropolis is broken up into four quadrants connected by abandoned highways and rail networks. After you accept a mission, you have to find effective and sometimes creative ways to navigate the environments to reach your objective, either by ploughing through zombies with weapons or looking for alternative routes that are not as heavily populated.

In addition to travelling from point A to B during missions, you also end up investing a lot of time in the gathering of supplies and creation of weapons. The game world of Dead Rising 3 is littered with a seemingly endless amount of interactive objects that can be stored for future use or used immediately to attack zombies.

While basic objects can be picked up and used as weapons against enemies, they are sometimes ineffective and soon break. Fortunately, Dead Rising 3 allows you to combine two or more items into more effective weapons that not only dish out more damage, but also work longer without breaking.

Zombies as far as you can see

Dead Rising 2 already introduced a large number of interactive objects and combinations for crafting weapons, but Dead Rising 3 manages to surpass this by adding more to the mix. With all of the objects available to pick up in the game world, it seems like the possibilities for crafting weapons are near limitless.

If homemade weapons weren’t enough, then Dead Rising 3 has also introduced drivable vehicles, as well as blueprints to modify them for added defensive and offensive capabilities. While crafting weapons and vehicles has the potential to slow down the game experience, it’s fun enough in Dead Rising 3 so it doesn’t become a chore.

The added processing power of Xbox One has not only helped increase the scale of the game compared to Dead Rising 2, but it also comes with a significant visual upgrade. In addition to the large number of interactive objects strewn throughout levels, large groups of zombies occupy each quadrant of the game world, to the point where you often feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of enemies on the screen.

All of this is capped off with a frame rate that runs at a steady clip even in the busiest areas of the game. Possibly more than any other launch game, Dead Rising 3 really demonstrates the capabilities of the console and how it has resulted in features not seen on the Xbox 360.

Difficult bosses

Boss battles were one of the weaker aspects of Dead Rising 2, and the same seems to ring true for the third game. Although the series is set in an open world, the boss battles are not and instead require you to fight them in a conventional manner in a closed space.

The bosses in Dead Rising 3 can sometimes be difficult to fight and defeat, and often require you to spend significant time in preparing supplies and weapons. Even then, it may not be enough to defeat the bosses, as they may have some powerful and difficult-to-avoid attacks that border on being unfair.

The storytelling in past Dead Rising games has often been buried in the technology and scope of the game itself, and the third game does not really break the mould. Nick as a character is reasonably interesting and fun to play as, but the narrative itself is mostly forgettable and doesn’t add that much more to the enjoyment of the missions. Nevertheless, it’s a worthy sequel.