Love/Hate ‘The Walking Dead’? Try ‘Dead Rising 4’ This Christmas

Before, you had to babysit survivors on their way back to a safehouse, or give them weapons and hope for the best, but here, once they’re saved, they’re good.

Capcom also absolutely nails the personality, the freakish charm, and the Christmastime consumerism setting of the Willamette Memorial Megaplex. Longtime players of the franchise will surely appreciate the ease of crafting.

There is one fun addition, though. If you come across a cardboard standee of Street Fighter’s E. Honda or find a Rival Schools arcade machine during your trip through the game, you can snap a shot of it to get bonus points that help you improve your skills. Get this; by combining various objects and weapons at a workbench you can create new and exponentially more devastating tools of zombie mutilation. The suits do run on battery, so they will run out of juice quickly.

But I did enjoy myself in this game immensely. Yes, the pool of zombie titles in gaming continues to be deep, but Dead Rising 4 still finds its place, striking a unique balance between deep story and the wildest zombie open world of them all. The diversity in missions is actually a pleasant surprise as well. Using a tricked-out camera (infrared-scanner, clue analyzer, etc.), Frank meanders around often very bloody points of interest, providing pithy commentary, and solving cases easily.

For an industry that spends so much of its time focused on getting things done in time for the Christmas season, video games themselves do not seem to give much of a shit about Christmas as a setting. The previously mutinous save system has been updated with some exceedingly generous checkpoints and autosaves but I’d like to know if any of you ever needed them because I never did.

The parts that are easy to forget are the frustrating moments of trying to goof around while a timer ticked down, of constantly-dying survivors, of Otis hassling you over your walkie-talkie, and of how frustrating it was to be slowed down by even the smallest things. It would add more suspense to the light-hearted game, and would also make the detective elements feel less forced. That’s where you will find the Tread Maker Combo Vehicle blueprint. The town is fully realized and it’s where players can hop in all kinds of vehicles and just mow down hordes of zombies. Too much time is spent scanning rooms for highlighted items, and not enough time is spent using night vision as a means to explore dark areas.

If there are dead bodies inside, you’ll get the extra violence bonuses, but you won’t need many. The human AI is pretty terrible. If there’s a minor letdown to the game, it is that combat sees no improvement in nuance, despite the inclusion of a new class of zombie. Selfies, as much as I dislike the practice in general, actually serve a goal in granting you additional XP, and add to the thrill of taking a photo in a hairy situation. There’s one particular battle towards the end of the game that was utterly annoying. When four get together, they’re unstoppable.

Sound-wise, however, is where the game really shines. Combine an exo-suit with a squishee or arcade machine, and you have the flawless zombie-slaying machine. I created combo weapons whenever I could, even if they were ones I didn’t like or just didn’t use much in the single-player offering.

Ubisoft’s 2008 reboot of Prince of Persia is another, semi-recent example of a game that saved its denouement for a paid DLC. If there’s one thing I don’t like about this game, it’s that the main story sometimes spends too much time forcing Frank West to fight off military personnel. At other times swings will hit from too far away.

There’s also a multiplayer component that has you playing with three other friends (or alone) to complete missions in the zombie infested mall. You’re often in contact with Colonel of the ZDC, Brad Park, whose seriousness plays well off Frank’s nearly indifference to the dire situation presented to him.

And maybe that’s what really makes Dead Rising 4 so great. Taking on hundreds of zombies at a time should be fun, not a chore, but here it feels like busy work. The team chose to focus on what made this franchise so enjoyable, and it worked out. Even though Dead Rising 4 does a great job early on of making you think you’ve encountered a large group of zombies, it amps it way up as time goes by.

No matter what I say in the coming paragraphs, I liked the direction Dead Rising 4 was heading – particularly the West direction.