‘Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster’ Serves 2006 Vibes in a 2024 Package

I bounced off Dead Rising in 2006. The ticking time limit stressed me out, the brain-dead survivor AI had me yelling in frustration, and, most annoyingly, I was playing on an old SD TV and the in-game text was too small to read. Capcom’s advice: I should “definitely have an HDTV“. Cheers guys, very helpful.

After an hour of not having much fun I returned the game, wrote off the franchise, and haven’t looked back. So, eighteen years later, when I was offered a code for Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster I desperately tried to palm it off on another reviewer. Everyone else was busy, so I gritted my teeth and gave it as fair a shake as possible.

Huh. Turns out Dead Rising is a whole bunch of fun! First things first, the Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster is precisely what it says on the tin. This isn’t the Dead Rising equivalent of the Resident Evil remakes, but the original game transplanted to Capcom’s RE Engine with a complete graphical overhaul and many quality-of-life improvements.

So, after almost two decades, why is it time for Dead Rising to rear its undead head again? What becomes quickly apparent is that there still aren’t many games like this. You are photojournalist Frank West, tossed into a zombie-infested shopping mall with an agreement with a helicopter pilot to pick you up 72 hours later.

The story plays out as a series of appointments. For example, being being in the security room at 11 am, or arranging to meet a character at a specific time and place. Until those moments roll around you explore the mall, find survivors, and escort them to safety. After running through this loop a few times I had a revelation, Dead Rising isn’t a zombie-killing game, it’s a people-rescuing game!

The stupid and slow zombies infesting the mall aren’t so much enemies as obstacles and it’s easy to run rings around them. Zombies can chew on Frank all day and he won’t turn, the mall is littered with health-restoring food items and, after a few level-ups, you have to actively try to get killed by the shambling horde. For most of the game, the challenge is tracking down the survivors and guiding them to safety, often with a fun wrinkle like having to find a Japanese phrase book to be able to explain the situation to some terrified tourists.

This process is smoothed out by a huge improvement in survivor AI. In the original I remember annoyedly yelling at them when, rather than run to safety at my side, they stood in the middle of a zombie scrum and flailed around uselessly. In the remaster survivors have a much better sense of self-preservation and don’t require nearly as much babysitting. Partially this is down to improved pathfinding, but I suspect the zombie AI has also been tweaked to prioritize targeting you over them.

Unfortunately the same cannot be said of the “Psychos”, regular people driven to homicidal rage by the zombie nightmare. These are effectively the game’s bosses and, sadly, the most visibly dated thing in this remaster. It’s not great that the key to victory is always luring them into complex level geometry, waiting for them to get stuck, and unloading on them while they can’t move. Also, despite being normal uninfected people they don’t go down until they’ve taken around 20 shotgun blasts to the face, dragging battles out way beyond the point of enjoyment.

These bosses weren’t great in 2006 and they’re positively prehistoric in 2024, but completely revamping these encounters would be against the spirit of this remaster project. There are a few other flies in the ointment. I was a little surprised that there’s noticeable graphical pop-in when traversing the open area in the center of the mall, with hordes of zombies appearing out of thin air. Graphical update aside this is still fundamentally an Xbox 360 game and modern hardware should be able to handle this without breaking a sweat. Maybe something for a patch to address?

I’m also not much of a fan of the game’s “Overtime Mode”, which is mandatory if you want an actual conclusion to the story. This swaps out the zombies for damage-sponge special forces with assault rifles who can rapidly and efficiently stun-lock you to death. Fortunately, this part of the game is relatively short but, like the Psychos, regular humans with iffy AI aren’t much fun to fight against.

But Dead Rising is a hard game to hate. As the hours rolled by and I learned the mall’s layout I was surprised how wrapped up I got in the story. As you would expect from a zombies-in-a-mall tale, the game is built on the foundation of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. But, refreshingly, it uses that as a springboard to expand on its satire of mindless consumerism.

Ultimately, the core fantasy of Dead Rising isn’t being an unstoppable zombie-killing badass, it’s being able to shop until you drop. Every store in the mall is explorable, replete with new outfits, items, magazines, food, and a ludicrous variety of weapons. And, what with the zombie invasion, everything is 100% off! But consumerism doesn’t work without spending money, with the rapid item degradation underlining that everything for sale is disposable tat nobody needs.

Without spoiling anything, the deeper you get into the plot the more the story leans into this philosophy, eventually arriving at an unexpected condemnation of the meat industry, encouragement to the player to go vegan, a blunt criticism of third-world exploitation, and a sly coda drawn from the nursery rhyme “Robin the Bobbin”: “and yet he complained / that his belly was not full”.

Nobody’s going to walk out of Dead Rising having had a road-to-Damascus-style conversion to anticapitalism and veganism, but there’s more meat on the bones than you’d expect from a game in which you dress up as Mega Man and bonk zombies with a lawn parasol.

I enjoyed the heck out of my time with Dead Rising, and in retrospect, I wish I’d tried a little harder to love it back in 2006. If I – who booted this up as a certified Dead Rising hater – can get so much enjoyment out of this excellent remaster, I suspect you can too. Don’t go in expecting perfection, just a good time that remains relatively unique in gaming.

---