A walking sim that tries to accurately portray blindness and fails. I'm legally blind. I appreciate their effort but it's not a fun game.

First off, this game is pretty.The watercolor graphics are nice. It controls fine. It does have a few good ideas. The whole noise system is neat. She hears something but doesn't know what it is. Only figures it out when she is close. Cute idea. Kind of accurate to real life.

So as I said, this is a walking sim. It's pretty much only walking. Painfully slow walking. I get it, she can't see and thus walks slow. But it's not fun.

Okay here is where I get real critical. The story. It's cute, but there are some major issues in terms of accuracy. I want to remind you, I'm legally blind.

First, this is like an 8 year old girl. Where are her parents? And why would any adult leave her unsupervised knowing she is blind. That's bad parenting.

Secondly, where is her cane? She should know how to use a cane as this point. She is 10 and as far as we know, she was born blind. As someone who uses a cane for their sight, it is beyond me, why she doesn't have one. If she would one, have more confidence walking around and two, not fall, trip and struggle so much.

Like I appreciate the devs tried to make a game about someone who is blind. I appreciate they tried to convey a blind person's experiences of the world. However, I don't feel like they spoke to anyone in the visually impaired community.

The game is soooo tedious with such an obvious story. A for effort but fails in most ways.

She slowly walks up to me, emanating gatekeep girlboss gaslight energy from every step taken, deliberately. Once she makes sure I am within whispering vicinity, she utters those words

"Makoto get strapped or get clapped"

Ayo Kyoko I will never forget you manhandles an uncontrollable tear frenzy

I'm not the brightest bulb in the room, but neither are they. Do they deserve death for this reason? No!! Hence why this is a series of hopium and copium, and this is the train's first stop. Still kinda funny, these executions really have "mods kill this guy" energy to them. Everything is so over-the-top in its writing and presentation that it's very difficult to be whelmed. You gotta have an opinion on this game. Some people were FNAF kids and I guess I was a Dangan kid... a late bloomer though I was already 15, and since then the only game that came out was a beach episode cashgrab coming out in winter.

I won't sugarcoat it, this is W writing. It's absurd, it's complex, it hits you when it needs to. Kodaka's style is something special. He knows how to blueball his audience and you're still in his grasp. The protagonist Big Mac is a template compared to the others, the whole cast has grounded designs and less complex personalities but they bounce off eachother due to the story's nature, and it's a delight to see. A battle royale with emphasis on relationships and deductions is like, best template ever! So many quality fangames are being made for this reason. Very few are actually completed, people don't see the labor needed for the whole package, meanwhile Kodaka made a sequel in 2 years the mad lad.

Uh oh, someone died. You better not have been watching Shrek 2 in the projector room or you won't have an alibi! The main course is, naturally, the class trials hosted by horror-mascot-before-mascot-horror-games-existed Monokuma! Fun fact: he's feeling white. These transracial statements don't surprise me, he's never been one for being likeable. Gather round fellas, the council has decided- wait, you're part of it. Democracy sucks it should be an authoritarian Kirigiri government but Big Mac needs to grow a spine and somehow outsmart Byakuya, whose face is shown next to "sigma male alpha chad" in Urban Dictionary. No seriously, he faces off an entire country in the novels it's wild. My favorite character is and will still be Sakura, I trust I won't have to explain this one. But, really I only dislike Celeste. She's hyped up to be a whole lot of nothing in the end that can't live up to expectations. The VA's shoulders must be sore by now.

Make no mistake, Dead Island can be a fun game, but it is by no means a good game. I originally played this when it came out and I remember having a good time with it, but having played it again after playing Dead Island 2, it’s pretty safe to say that this game is literal poo poo doo doo. However, it is still kinda fun if you allow it to take you for a ride. With that I mean, play this in co-op only. Dead Island is a series that is hard carried by its multiplayer aspects. Without them, this game is a huge slog for a multitude of reasons. It’s got pretty terrible balancing issues, horrible skill trees, horrendous audio, bad traversal, boring quests, and a confusingly shallow plotline that gets made easier to handle with the more friends you play it with.

Every year for my birthday I get a little co-op session going with my friends and this year, Dead Island was the chosen one. With 4 main characters that appear in each cutscene, we needed to play it the way it was meant to be played, with each of us playing as each one. After some convincing, we managed to pull it off. Two of them were ready to rumble, not really knowing what they were getting themselves into, while the third was begging for a sniper to take him out the whole time. I allowed them to pick their characters before choosing my own since I was the one player who had already beaten the game. Somehow I still ended up playing as Xian, who is bananas busted in comparison to the other three characters. For some reason, they decided that each character would be an expert in different combat styles and nothing really else. So while Xian and Sam B. are really good at using sharp and blunt weapons respectively, Purna is better at shooting the guns and Logan is good at…. um.. throwing objects.

While you may think that shooting guns is a good skill to have, this game just does not allow you to obtain a single gun until like 50% of the way into the game. Even then, it’s still extremely hard to find ammo and the guns are unusable most of the time. Blunt and sharp weapons are littered all over the place, and with Xian and Sam’s skill trees favoring damage and critical chance success, they’re easily the two characters that are skewed in favor of having the most fun out of everyone. It’s this initial kneecapping right at the start of the game that would probably taint the perception you’d have playing this game in single-player. Without this knowledge, you might pick either Purna or Logan and then realize you’re in too deep once the going gets going. Logan is actually able to deal some heavy damage with his throws, but my friend ran into this bug constantly where his weapons would just disappear upon impact. He’d be left empty handed more often than not, even with the boomerang skill maxed out. The plus side to multiplayer is that a lot of this ends up not mattering in the slightest. What would be a slog to get through by yourself, immediately becomes a speedrun with friends. The game will throw a big boss at you and the four of you will just beat him to death like a group of cavemen swinging sticks on an animal.

The one thing that multiplayer can’t really save though is the annoying as shit fetch quests that plague every story beat of this game. It’s fine in the beginning when you’re in the resort area, still getting your bearings, but the same fetch quests that John Sinamoi gives you are the same fetch quests that every other character will give you moving forward. “Hey, you four morons, can you please go to the warehouse outside and kill the zombies and grab some gasoline canisters for me pretty please?” No bitch, do it yourself!!! Each act has literally the same mission progression: show up confused, travel across the map multiple times to get supplies for a group of survivors you meet, go on a rescue escort mission, come back to the survivors having been mauled to death while you were gone, leave the area, and rinse and repeat. Two times is okay, but three and four…? It gets pretty monotonous. Dead Island is at its best in the first act, where you’re exploring the resort area. There’s something kind of metal about the whole blood in the sand, sunny beach vibes ruined by zombies that kinda hits different for me. I think at the time of its release, it was the first piece of zombie media to go there as it’s setting and it’s still really cool now, just hitting home how outrageously horrific a zombie outbreak could be while it’s descending on unsuspecting beachgoers on vacation who were having the time of their lives like day ago. Unfortunately, you only spend like a good hour and a half during this portion of the game because the characters eventually leave to these less interesting and gross looking maps afterwards.

Once you hit Act II, the game drops off hard. It’s just these really drab looking sewers, prisons, ugly jungles, and endless hallways that you’re constantly walking back and forth through. Even in the Definitive Edition it all still looks really ugly. It makes the fetch quests stand out even worse as the maps grow larger, you’re having to traverse further for the same quest but with different supplies, forcing you to walk through the sewers more times than legally allowed. The outside traversal will most likely be done by some of the most difficult to drive vehicles as well. You can walk, but it’ll take forever so there’s no point but to give up and just have someone ride that whip into the sunset, over and over again, constantly crashing it into trees and random blockades. There are some horrible oversights that come with this though. The cars only have 4 seats to adapt to the amount of potential players, but the escort missions don’t account for that. You’ll need the NPC to have a seat, which meant that 1 poor schmuck was hauling ass on foot behind us instead. This would be mitigated sometimes by the game allowing the stragglers to fast travel to the other players, but only when a main quest was about to take place, otherwise they’d be left behind. We also ran into this really annoying issue where everyone would body block each other in small hallways, which is definitely bound to happen in the later acts. Someone would just sit in a doorway and AFK as a joke while everyone else was left screaming in the room they were stuck in. You’d open a door to find an explodey zombie and perish because your friends are standing in the way.

Luckily, death is kind of just a suggestion in these games. The great thing about Dead Island is that when you die, you respawn back into the action rather quickly, instead of being sent back to a save from hours ago or having to rewatch the cutscenes. You get a little countdown and then blip back into existence just a short distance away. It’s nice because it allows you the freedom to just full send yourself right into a group of enemies and try again. The only real downside to death is that you lose a percentage of the money you’ve found laying around. There’s unfortunately a currency system in this game and its economy is kind of wild. Money is not hard to find at all, but it is a pain in the ass to lose like $3,000 because you slipped off a cliff. You can use the money to buy new weapons or crafting materials, but you also need it to repair and upgrade them for some reason. The weapon durability varies and some items are expensive as shit to maintain, so to lose a huge chunk of your money is pretty annoying. The game does give you a crap ton of weapons to work with though and you’ll likely be swapping your inventory out every once in a while anyways. This is a system that is just done better in Dead Island 2 though. Modifying the weapons is cool, if only for a moment. Electrifying or combusting the enemies is useful as it keeps them stunned, but the damage can also be self-inflicting. You’ll be swinging on an enemy nutty style, then die because your friend shot it with an explosive fire bullet. It’s just awful how much your co-op partners can get in the way sometimes, and I’m sure playing this with randoms back then was probably a nightmare of endless trolling.

When the four of us finished the game and the sound of Sam B.’s famous “Who do you voodoo, BITCH?” overtook our headphones, I asked them what they thought, only to be met with 10 seconds of raw deafening silence. They didn’t even know what they just witnessed. The gameplay was okay and getting through this with friends was an experience I’m sure we’ll cherish together like a couple of friends sharing survivor’s guilt after an accident, the overall consensus was mass confusion and I don’t really blame them. This game’s “story” is held together with band-aids and chewing gum. The core 4 characters only get shit done because everyone else you run into is extremely stupid, just doing the most moronic things for seemingly zero reason at all. For every dumb thing that happens in this game, there were like 5 smarter alternative solutions you could come up with almost instantaneously, but that’s just how it is on this bitch of an Earth!!! The cutscenes teleport the characters around in ways only magic could pull off, with random moments of tension just ending abruptly. The characters are just unpleasant for the sake of being unpleasant and it tries to be serious the whole time, with nothing injected to give it a bit more life or breathing room. They don’t emote in any way at all, so something will happen and they’ll just kind of look like a deer in the headlights. You know you’re supposed to be upset because the emotional piano music is playing, but Purna’s eyes are looking in two different directions, so the whole thing ends up being funny instead. Now compare all of this to the most clickbait trailer ever and you can see why a lot of people think this game is diarrhea. Dead Island 2 really leaned hard on the comedic aspects that I think worked fairly well for it, but here there is no joy. It’s all “We gotta get out of here!!” impatience at the cost of not giving a shit about anything else going on, which makes meeting all the other characters pointless. Xian is the only character with glimpses of compassion written into her, but there’s a point in the story where a side character gets sexually assaulted off screen and all 4 characters, including Xian, are verbally just like, “Well, if you weren’t such a bozo idiot then this wouldn’t have happened!!” Huh???

It’s a story that does a lot more telling than showing. You’ll appear at an area where everyone was killed by zombies and a lone survivor will just explain to you what happened. You don’t actually see any sort of conflict that is inflicted on anyone aside from the ones in the core 4’s vicinity, so there’s no reason to really care for what happens. Those events are just vessels to shuffle them off to the next area and never see those characters again. Oh, what about the origins of the virus? How’d this even happen? Oh, someone just quickly explains it to you while you escort them and have your dick pounded by an onslaught of zombies. You can’t just show anything, it all has to be explained in the worst way possible so that you don’t even retain anything being said to you anyways. Jin is the only character that follows the party for the majority of the game and is given some weird emotional pseudo-arc, but it all falls flat when she’s just rendered as the game’s sentient storage unit who adds nothing else. She doesn’t help the character’s in any way, shape, or form, and the characters don’t have anything nice to say about her either. It doesn’t help that while escorting her, she bugs out and freezes in place randomly, so you can despise her in that way too!

Speaking of, there are a lot of weird buggy issues with this game. I’m pretty positive that the Definitive Edition fixed a lot of those issues, but there are some that are still prevalent. I remember in the original it was really easy to dupe and glitch the hell out of the damage modifiers on the weapons, and I’m not sure if that’s fixed or not but it was crazy being able to do millions of damage back then. I already mentioned Logan and Jin’s issues, but there were also some problems where zombies would just kinda disappear and then come back, or they’d phase through walls. The most grating issue for me though was that the audio mixing was shitting itself the whole time. For some reason whenever someone shot a gun or landed a critical attack, it would sound like someone played the metal pipe sound effect everytime. I don’t even know how else to describe it, it just sounded like they were hitting metal on metal when it should have been more of a flesh sounding injury. It’s just odd. The game overall looks so much nicer in the definitive edition, but the stand out is still the resort area. That part looks amazing and the rest of the game is just hampered down by some really boring set pieces after that. The original used to have this vaseline filter over the top of it and it was thankfully removed here. It did however come at the cost of removing the paper quests that the NPCs would give you, which I thought added a little charm to this rather charmless game.

I do have to mention though that something about the FOV or general visual is so off in this game too. Specifically when your character is sprinting, the screen becomes filtered and shaky. I had to turn off motion blur and adjust all my other settings because it was making me motion sick, which has never happened to me in a game before. I had to nibble on some snacks while I played to prevent it from ending my life early, so watch out for that if you have a weak stomach for first-person POV games, or just avoid it entirely.

I don’t despise this game at all, in fact I still found a lot of fun with this playthrough. It is just simply not a good game, but I would qualify it as circulating back to the “good kind of bad” in some way. There’s a reason why it’s considered a bit of a cult classic. I can’t in good faith give it a higher rating just because having friends makes it a little less awful though. However, If you’re gonna eat some dog shit, you might as well eat dog shit with some company. And hey! It could have been a lot worse. We could have been playing Dead Island: Riptide instead. Now there’s an idea for next year 🤔.

It's finally done..

I find it so comically ironic that this game takes place near Christmas, a time of capitalistic soul sucking. Where sales and profit are at the utmost high and workers are treated like shit, devilishly masking itself under the innocence of child-like Christmas Santa Claus and snow flurry wonder. Dead Rising 4 could not be anymore soulless, just a pure husk of what once was. And it wasn’t even planned to be the last of the last, since this game’s horrible reception wasn’t even enough to stop Capcom Vancouver from continuing on like nothing had happened. Apparently not by their own volition, but Papa Capcom's instead. That is, until they were ended.

I really don’t have any anecdote to express in the same sentiment as my last review of Dead Rising. Like a lot of people who despise this game, I am just a big fan of the original game who watched as the series was slowly tortured to death by the studio it was shoved off into the arms of. I’m trying to put a word on how I feel, but can’t really conjure it up in my brain. I don’t think that bitterness is the right one. I think that if I had played it back when it came out in 2016, instead of avoiding it, I’d be angry I guess. But, now it’s 2024 so I suppose overall pathetic disappointment is leaning more towards the right answer. I’m just… so disappointed, my son.

There is a lot that I find wrong with this game, so bear with me. Dead Rising 4 fails at being a Dead Rising game and also fails at being a good game. I will try to get more into the former part later as it reaches into narrative territory, but if you remove what would be considered the staples of a Dead Rising game from Dead Rising, then all that you’re left with is another zombie game. And while some zombie games are pretty fun, this one is not. I want to try my absolute best to not compare this one with the previous iterations, but they’ve made it impossible to do so by turning Dead Rising 4 into “fan service”, which is weird calling it that since it might as well have served fans a plate of dogshit for dinner instead. I tried very hard to get through this without raising an eyebrow and I was almost successful through the prologue but that was it. “Frank West” is back as the protagonist of this game, although voiced by a completely different person for seemingly no reason at all. I was willing to swallow that pill and put it aside, but as soon as the game actually opened up and “Frank” was standing in what was considered the mall’s FOOD COURT?? They completely lost me. Immediately.

I can’t find a good picture of it, but this aspect of the game is what made me despise the direction Capcom Vancouver went in for this series. The Food Court of this damn mall is like… an Aztec?? Amazonian Forest replication with all these winding Planet Zoo ass elevated pathways and movie studio quality set pieces that only exist to look nice with zero function. Sir, this is a mall in Colorado. The Food Court alone, in this game, is the size of a fucking city. It’s a layout that is not only confusing to look at, but to traverse as well. Now put a bunch of zombies in it and you’re in for a really annoying time. This layout bleeds into the rest of the mall as well, as this game claims that Willamette mall was rebuilt into a megaplex after the events of the first game. Now the whole place is broken up into themed “towns”, like medieval and Tokyo. This is for completely no reason at all, other than having cool things to look at, but at the end of the day it doesn’t even matter because you’re only in the mall for 5 minutes before being thrown out into the open world that is the actual town of Willamette in Dead Rising 3 style map layout. The initial charm of the setting of the first game came from how tightly built the map layout of Willamette mall was. It was small, but there was always something to do, there were always things to find, and it was easy to memorize where things were and how to get there. There was a guiding arrow to point you in the right direction of the scoops, but you master the layout so quickly in that game that you end up not needing it. Here, you have to open the map just to turn a fucking corner down the street, with an ugly mini-map covering the corner of the game with waypoints that tell you distance. That distance being 1,000 yards, so get walking, idiot. It’s not good. It was already terrible in Dead Rising 3, and they somehow made it even worse in this game. News flash game executives, bigger is not always better!! Please stop!!!

There’s no point in destroying the map to look cooler, or larger, just for it to have nothing in it. There’s no reason to explore in this game aside from finding more dumbass combo weapon recipes, which are barely hidden in the first place. You can literally just purchase the ability for them to appear on your map and then grab them like a checklist, or like a chore (a recurring theme for this game). The fun of Dead Rising came from rewarding the player for their initiative to explore the area and find new ways to kill the enemies with. You weren’t finding useless garbage just made for achievement hunting back then, you were finding better weapons, hidden food items, and survivors that turned into leveling you up after escort. The magic of that is just completely lost here when the rewards are just Steam Trophies and already built combo weapons that break as quickly as you pick them up. There are no survivors in this game, technically, and there aren’t any missions aside from the linear main story content. Survivors are now relegated to Red Dead Redemption style world events where it’s just some randomly generated schmuck getting pounded by zombies until you rescue them, then dropping a random combo weapon and running away, never to be seen again. They no longer have personalities or quests. They are nothing but very ugly. Everyone, including “Frank”, looks like moldy cheese in this crusty ass game. Briefly too, there are no psychopaths in this game as well, those who were considered to be the bosses of these games. Again, they’re “here” but the lights are on and nobody is home. No cutscene to introduce them, no special battle mechanics or music, no real spotlight for them to shine. They’re just here with their minions, and get snuffed out as swiftly as candle light. Ironic, isn’t it?

Combo weapons are the actual bane of my existence. They weren’t initially this egregious, but were an ability given to Chuck Greene in a similar vein to Frank’s photographic abilities that were unique to him. He was a guy who had already seen some shit before the Fortune City outbreak and was intuitive enough to connect his knowledge of motocross with engineering makeshift weapons to fight with. They then expanded on it by making Nick Ramos a literal car mechanic to justify that skill now being used on vehicles, which is stupid but still made some semblance of sense. Frank West does not have the ability to do this and never has. You could argue that Off the Record Frank West can, but Off the Record is a non-canon alternate universe. He should not have the ability or want to hot glue grenades onto pitchforks, or combine a shopping cart into a go-kart with fucking laser beams. It’s all just stupid! They trivialize the shit out of these games without the work to obtain them. It gave them the excuse to just plaster combo weapons all over the place and overwrite what made the original game so fascinating. In this game, combo weapons are not an outlier, they are the norm. It’s no longer about using what you can to survive, it’s all about using annoying particle effects and flashy execution animations that drop the frame rate and pop the audio. It’s been overhauled into an action game where the enemies parry you like Dark Souls while you dodge roll your way around the arena. The action takes way more a precedent now than everything else that made Dead Rising cool.

The zombies in this game act like sand bags and it’s aggravating. Not only are there so many more, but “Frank” isn’t able to push through them easily. It’s like as soon as their hitboxes collide, he’s walled into a stun and stopped in his tracks first. Both them and the hostile humans are also so annoyingly tanky as well, either in their defense or just the sheer amount of health they have. It takes god damn forever to kill them in this game and therefore your inventory suffers because of it. The weapons break more often than they ever have, leaving you empty handed way too much. The normal items no longer seem to deal any damage, only the combo ones. So either make combo weapons on the fly or get fucking pummeled to death, I guess. That's if the game would even let me. Sometimes I would open the crafting menu and "Frank" would just stand there frozen, and I'd have to do gymnastics to get out of the menu for it. I hate it. I think that they knew this too, because the really shitty boss fights in this game have items and food littered around the floor all over the place, knowing that your shit would be busted upon walking into it. These fights are the most shallow, boring, pot shot back and forth bullshit you’ve seen in 100 games before this one and it doesn’t even try to re-invent it. Remember when you had to quickly maneuver yourself around the butchered cows that Larry left hanging up so that he wouldn’t immediately charge and overpower you? Or how Cliff would use his makeshift tunnels to avoid your attacks? Well, here you have to use a gun to lower the boss’s health enough to coax him into the arena where you can just slice him with the one of 45 battle axes they left near your feet. That boss's name by the way? He’s just called “Lieutenant”. Riveting stuff, guys.

Don’t even get me started on the exo suits. Yeah, because what Dead Rising needed were these over the top and flashy exo suit armor sets that “Frank” puts on to deal AoE damage. You find them all over the place with virtually zero explanation. Some of the enemies and bosses wear them as well, like they’re the latest fashion. I just want to find the literal one person who probably thought this was cool and gently ask them… why? In most instances you put them on for like 5 seconds and then after the objective, the cutscenes just tear it off of you. It’s all so pointless, so bland. It’s so stupid. They gutted everything that makes these games actually fun and put a shiny chrome coating over it to such an unrecognizable degree. They even went and overhauled the perfectly fine inventory mechanics and greased up their skill tree they crammed into the game from Dead Rising 3. A huge gripe of mine for this game was that they made going through your inventory a huge pain in the ass for seemingly no reason? Before you had a limited amount of slots, but the slots were always visible. You could always see what was in your inventory very clearly, and could sift through it quickly by using the controller bumpers. Now? You have to hold the D-Pad, then sort through 3 different inventories to select which weapon you want to use. Sure, they give you more slots to work with, but they’re divided into thirds and you can only throw items that are considered “throwable” meaning that dropping items is also a pain in the ass. You can only carry 2 food items at a time until you upgrade the ability to carry more. It’s just a terrible design for the sake of being different and makes inventory management a complete nightmare. I don’t know what they were thinking when they decided to change this.

Overall, this is just not Dead Rising. Just because the title of the game indicates otherwise and they dragged Frank back to Willamette, does not make a Dead Rising game. It’s just a terrible zombie game with a husk of the man that just says “I’ve covered wars, ya know?” like it’s one of those rage comic memes you made when you were 12 and tried to forget about. This character is not Frank West, and it’s not just the change in voice acting that showcases that. This is a completely different person and he’s annoying as shit. I talked a lot more about Frank West as a character in my Dead Rising 1 review, but he isn't this MCU, “Erm, well THAT just happened!!” annoying shithead that this game claims him to be. He never shuts the fuck up!! Capcom Vancouver just does not know Frank West and should have never had the rights to write whatever fanfiction they wanted to about him. He’s either rendered to be a running fat joke or this obnoxious, lippy asshole that has to commentate on everything around him. Not to mention, the other terrible characters in this game seem to keep suggesting that Frank West has always been this money hungry, fame seeking, terrible human and I just do not buy it. Frank’s initial motivation for entering Willamette in the first game was to put his neck on the line to find a big scoop that could have propelled him into making a name for himself, but becomes much more empathetic to the cause after hearing Isabela out, which drove him to reporting the outbreak. You know, so that the US government would be held responsible for the irresponsible war crimes they committed and covered up?? He didn’t just do that because it would make him money, it could have quite literally gotten him killed. He cared! The suggestion that he was always out for fame and money just trashes this arc he went on that showed the actual human side of his character. He is not a human in this game, he is an unfunny guy who’s reading a script that would rival Forspoken.

Now let’s put Frank out of his misery finally. There are other characters in this game, but I would use that term very lightly. The combo weapon designs in this game have more personality designed into them than the wooden cast of supporting characters you meet. You have Vick Chu, who is Frank’s student and that’s really all you get to know about her. You’re told that they have a mentor/student relationship, but the way that Vick screams and berates “Frank” in this game leads us to believe that they’re more like a surrogate father/daughter type of deal and it’s completely un-fucking-earned. She disappears for 95% of the game and there’s no establishing scenes that showcase their relationship aside from dialogue. So, when Vick comes out of left field reaming “Frank” about how she disagrees with his motivations in the plot, she just comes across as this huge gigantic asshole. Seriously, what the hell is Vick’s problem? LMAO. You can see that they were trying to somehow shoehorn her into being Frank’s successor, but it’s so painful to watch because she’s the most unlikable person in the whole game. Calder is a nobody character who we know nothing about, that gets randomly upgraded to supervillain half way through the plot. He barely has any lines and doesn’t integrate well with the story progression. He virtually has nothing to do with it at all. Hammond and her group of survivors have little to say and add nothing, but have a conflict shoved down your throat in Frank Rising that makes you feel more confused than anything else. And who is Brad? The only Brad I know of is Brad Garrison. They seriously couldn’t think of a different name for this pointless, useless character? They’re all just horrible, unlikable, and unfunny “characters” so why should the player give any shit about what happens to any of them?

I’ve been guilty of saying this myself, but there’s this sentiment that people “don’t play Dead Rising games for the plot” and I find that to be a reductive way of ignoring criticism after having played this game. Dead Rising as a series does have an interconnecting plot that they chose to continue on their own terms. Those plots range from goofy to pretty mediocre, with some satirical glimpses into US politics. While those glimpses exist to move the story along, they don’t really have anything that serious to say at the end of the day. It’s just that the gameplay mechanics tend to carry the weight of this series. When you remove all of the fun mechanics out of Dead Rising, you are left with the story. Dead Rising 4 not only has terrible gameplay mechanics, but it also has a terrible, terrible story. The events set up in the first two games at least made narrative sense and didn’t introduce plot inconsistencies anyone paying even the smallest bit of attention could point out.

I am genuinely wondering if anyone in the remaining shambles at Capcom Vancouver even played Dead Rising 1 before getting their hands on this series, because Dead Rising 3 already had some questionable revisionist decisions that meddled a bit with the aftermath of the events of the initial Willamette outbreak. I wouldn’t call it retconning, but they definitely did some unneeded meddling in the lore of this series that just raises more questions than answers and completely pisses on the mystery of the Santa Cabeza cover-ups that were already set in place. We did not need any further explanation of what happened in Santa Cabeza or why, at all, but they decided to bring back Dr. Barnaby’s corpse through the use of recorded testimonies he had made before his death 16 years ago. Ohhhhhh no guys, get it? Dr. Barnaby was actually playing 5-D Chess the whole time and was 15 steps ahead of everyone else!! Ohhh, noo he was actually spoilering his spoiler in a spoiler the whole time. Ohhh!!! Shut the FUCK up, no, he was not LOL. I really just despise when long-standing series feel the need to add into their mysteries. What’s the point of a mystery if you’re just gonna yap and explain away everything about it later? You’re giving away so much information that the whole thing just falls through your hands like sand. The more you add, the more inconsistencies there are to question. This just devalues Dr. Barnaby’s role in the first game for, again, no reason other than they wanted to. It just sucks.

And guess what, the ending isn’t even included into the game. It’s paid for DLC that adds an extra hour of content and a terrible ending. When I asked for a timer in my Dead Rising game, this is not what I meant. They give you a literal hour and a half to complete this content and for whatever reason, if you die, the timer doesn’t reset back to the point it was at upon Game Over. For some reason, there are challenges you have to do to get the good ending of this DLC, and you have to do all of them. There’s really no explanation for this. If you look at it in hindsight, the lack of challenge wins does not have any connection to what happens, it’s just if you don’t win them all, you get the bad ending. The distance this DLC makes you traverse on foot eats up most of that timer, meaning that any death is basically a loss for the player and results in the bad ending. However, the bad ending results in a different fate for characters you probably do not give two shits about, so who even cares anyways? Then it ends abruptly without any closure or follow-up. Cool use of $10, huh?

And after all of that, like a whimpering dog in the backyard, Capcom Vancouver was finally put out of their misery, shuddering their doors and never to work on these games again. (Very cool of you, Capcom Japan.) They wanted to bring Frank West back into their own game and play dress up with him under the guise of “bringing the games back to their roots” to a fanbase that was desperate for Dead Rising to be fun again. Instead they revised the shit out of the story, painted Christmas lights all over it, gutted all of the mechanics, made it wildly unfun and unimaginative, added mini-golf mode to try to extinguish the fires they made, and then DIED. It's not abundantly clear really who's fault laid where in the developmental mess of this game. It was set up to fail from the get go, with Capcom Japan not helping them in virtually anyway at all. There's several whisperings in the wind regarding how it wasn't meant to be a Dead Rising game in the first place and that obviously shows, but either way, we got this shit. There were people who told me that maybe I’d find something in it I liked, but that just did not happen. It was a sinking ship before it even left the dock. And it’s unfortunately still considered canon until Capcom HQ themselves decide to reboot this series, if that even happens. It’s definitely for the best that this series died when it did and it’s not a triumphant “finally” or even a sigh of relief. It’s just a disappointed shrug and life goes on. I didn't even get any catharsis out of writing this review like I do with some other 1 star games I've written about. How unfortunate.

Ah, film.

The Movies asks the player to make pure kino, and boy does it provide. Probably one of the better business tycoons ever made due to the sheer wealth of creativity it gives you to mess around with. It's amazing to me that we still haven't seen a similar game like this, aside from a demo that I've heard isn't nearly as stellar. The devs of this new game seem to be beating around the bush that their version will be lacking the Custom Script Editing that makes The Movies stand out in all of its mechanics, which sucks to hear. The Movies is a game that celebrates goofing off, experimenting, and being creative; a universe that exists in stark contrast to the money grubbing Hollywood we're dealing with today.

And in a tycoon stand point, everything is mostly streamlined to an interesting degree, without boring the player. While you watch your films being made, you can drag and drop those pesky freeloaders to the places they need to be to speed up more of the processes. And while you have several movies being made at a time, there's other offices constantly keeping busy with scriptwriters, with crew and extras running amok; genuinely highlighting the fact that a film is made from the hard work of hundreds of individuals even if only 1 - 5 people are listed in the intro credits. The campaign plops your studio in the 1920's and challenges the player with navigating the brutality of BUSINESS, as real world events determine genre popularity and technological advancements. It's just the details and overall research of the game that makes it oh so saucy. The last year of the campaign fittingly landing on 2005, the year that this game was released.

After getting my hands on it probably 15 years after the last time I played it, it felt like opening a Christmas gift. The insanity I unleashed upon this game, it didn't even know what had hit it. There is a sandbox mode that I recommend for the people coming into it wanting to mostly make goofy movies, but I settled for a campaign playthrough this time knowing it'd eventually have "an end" at some point. Here I realized what it must feel like to be a triple A game studio, spending a million dollars making a movie only to recoup $250,000 in returns. Suffering for my art.

The campaign is fun, but it also showcased a bit of the gripes I had for the management systems in this game. While you start out in the 1920's with little technology, etc. you are sort of left on rails for the most part. It's when you hit around the 1970's, everything just goes batshit insane. It takes some concentration to be able to manage several actors/directors, scriptwriters, and crew. While you're filming two movies, your actors have their own moods to keep in check. If they're upset at just about anything, it'll be harder to keep them working and your film's rating will suffer because of it. It's an aspect of the game that I genuinely like, but if mismanaged it could be detrimental. It seems there is a strategy behind setting up your campaign for success, as I didn't hire enough directors in my first initial hiring process. This was devastating as my one director became overstressed and quit, which led me to being BONED. Every once in a while you'll be thrust into an award ceremony where the results give the winners some OP bonuses, like making your stars basically unbothered for a short period of time, to giving them better experience gains. It's a rich gets richer scheme!! While my competitors swept the awards ceremonies, it became impossible for me to keep up. My studio was unfortunately and devastatingly mid at best. While I ended up finishing the whole campaign in 2005, we still ended it with -$500,000 in debt LOL. Welcome to Hollywood, baybee. Enjoy your newfound homelessness!

My main gripes with the game is that it can become a bit overwhelming to manage so many different units at once, but it is automatic for the most part. It only becomes an issue when you're understaffed, which is sort of typical. Since awards can launch your studio into the spotlight, you're less likely to acquire new employees if you're failing. It seems like after a certain point, the game just stops giving you potential hires for things like crew and maintenance, which meant that I had to pull from other departments to temporarily have an extra or crew member available. There's a deceptively evil fast forward mechanic, similar a la The Sims, that seems to only speed up the timeline of events and loss of money, rather than speeding up the actual employees who are working. The announcer lady would announce that a new person was in line to become an actor, but I'd go to the stage school and see no one there. Either she is a lying sack of shit or she announces it much too late every time. Either way, the shortage of staff is a quick way to bottleneck yourself into SUFFERING. The game gave me an Asian stuntwoman and then literally nothing else. So, I kept getting these funny reviews where the critics kept noticing how the stuntpeople never resembled the lead roles, who were mostly white men. It's a system with awesome rewards for your hard work and abysmal misery for failing, sometimes for things outside of your control. If there was a more frequent dispense of new employees in about every office, it would have easily mitigated all of those issues.

Which is why I recommend the sandbox mode for those wanting to dip a toe into this game for the first time, where your creativity can be displayed front and center. There isn’t a risk of getting a game over in this mode and offers a much more casual experience. The custom movie maker built into this game is fantastic for its time, with the ability to change weather, backdrops, costumes, and camera angles depending on the sets you’ve built on your lot. The list of poses and scenes you can work with is surprisingly expansive, especially with the Stunts and Effects pack installed, and it’s genuinely a fun time whether you’re taking the art of filmmaking seriously or not. That being said, it's a process that can be a bit time consuming and I wish there was a better way to make sure the actors and costumes stayed the same throughout the film. You’re given tools to make scripts automatically through the use of Screenwriters, who will write movies for you instead, but those screenwriters are smoking absolute crack cocaine. They’ll write movies that you wish you had the talent to make. Keep in mind though, that you could make the most incoherent movie ever and it will succeed solely based on the experience your lead characters in it have. It’s just fun to make dumb movies sometimes and I wish we could have a more modern version of this so badly. I want to start a new campaign fixing where I messed up in the previous one already. I need to know what it’s like to be #1, crushing the competition. PLEASE.

It’s more than a game. It’s CINEMA!

A spiritual successor to Banjo-Kazooie made by the original Rareware devs that fails to capture the magic and fails to listen to nearly 2 decades of criticisms.

Go check out all my reviews of DK64, Banjo-Tooie(N64), and Banjo-Kazooie Nuts n Bolts. To get the full story. I try not to review games I never beat but I'm telling a story and I had enough time with the game to make a fair judgement.

Nine years have past from Nuts n Bolts. Rare devs left because they were put in Kinnect jail for so long after it. They made their own studio. Their first project is to make a collectathon of old. Made by the kings of collectathons. Great idea right?

Sadly, the culmination of this is a failure. Why is that though? First off, the worlds are empty. They are too big. Sound familiar. Nearly 20 years, since DK64, a major complaint was your worlds are too big. Here we are. at the end of this story. They never learned. They even doubled down and added a mechanic that expanses the worlds making them even larger and emptier. This is just one of the flaws though.

The pagies(the jiggy equivalent), are no longer just, platform to them. Most of the time they are locked behind a challenge. In BK1 and 2 although there are jiggies locked behind challenges like races most are still simply platform to them or solve a puzzle with a move. This just isn't the case in Yooka-Laylee.

Let's talk about this game's version of the Talon Trot. The Talon Trot being a movement upgrade. It allows you to go up hills but also run. Super helpful move. Most of the time in BK you are using this move to run around worlds. Yooka-Laylee has a similar move. Except it sucks. It's hard to control. Yooka rolls up unto a ball while Laylee balances on him and they speed away. Great in theory. Sadly no one likes rolling on a ball as a mechanic. It's hard to control. It's hard to stay still. It's hard to adjust. It feels terrible. Traversing the world that is already too big with a bad traversal move.

Let's take about these challenges to get pagies. There is not a lot of variety here. What variety there is, gets old.

Another mechanic they made that was infuriating is for some reason there are stamina bars. And during races, one of the most used challenges in the game, you got to use the terrible Talon Trot equivalent rolling move plus deal with an unneeded stamina mechanic. How do you fill your stamina? With butterflies that are impossible to see while you are zooming around with bad controls during races. It's bad design all around. There was no need for a stamina bar.

Let's talk about the worlds. They are bland. They are sparse and void of life. And this is before expanded the world. It gets worse after that. There is so much dead space without anything meaningful there. No collectable, no NPC, no consumables, nothing. They never learned bigger isn't better. Despite nearly 2 decades of being told, that bigger isn't better. Most of the theming in the worlds are bland too. Although, the casino level is neat.

People complained about the voices being annoying. What did you expect? The Banjo voices aren't annoying yet these are? I think that was people just looking for more reasons to complain IMO. The voices are just fine.

Yet again, another complaint people had was about the quizzes. It's a Banjo spiritual successor. What did you expect? Of course there are going to be quizzes just like BK 1, 2 and Nuts n Bolts. Yet again people finding other reasons to complain despite having plenty of real things to complaint about.

You were sold on this being a successor to Banjo. The voices and quizzes are part of Banjo whether you like it or not. The quizzes are not even hard. They are mostly things you should already know. I'm sorry, but those complaints are people looking for things. They knew what they were buying into. It was sold on being Banjo.

Side note: I never beat the game, but the final boss looks like a nightmare from what I remember. So that is keeping in line with BK1. HAH!

Character design is great. I really like the duck, Dr Quack. They all have their charm. Yooka is clearly high and Laylee is mean. A bit meaner than Kazooie tbh. Sometimes unlikeable mean. But she is still charming. The humor is typical Rare humor.

So here we are, the end of this journey. A journey of me ripping into Rare and Playtonic. By no means are any of these bad games. I really just wanted to paint a picture of why things are the way they are. Why the collectathon kings fell out of the good graces with their fans. And why I personally, don't want them touching Banjo again. I don't trust them to. Somewhere along the line, they forgot what made Banjo good. It's just disappointing.

But let's end this on a good note. Yooka-Laylee has a sequel. It is a spiritual successor to Donkey Kong Country. And they did an amazing job with it. So maybe there is hope for Playtonic.

A terrible sequel to a beloved franchise but not a terrible game. It's a product of Rare not listening to criticism and what fans want. I don't make a habit of reviewing games I never beaten. I did play this game enough to know what I'm talking about. But I'm telling a story of why Yooka-Laylee is the way it is and why many Rareware's fall from grace.

We last left off with Banjo-Tooie(Go check out my N64 review for more details on that.) To sum up, for near a decade people made 2 main complaints about DK64 and Tooie. Worlds are too big. The game is tedious.

Fast forward to Microsoft buying Rare and the famous Banjo is Back trailer. It teases Banjo learning new moves. Traditional Banjo style gameplay. Fast forward to 2008 when the game comes out. It's a vehicle platformer no one asked for or wanted.

Why did this happen? Rare had 2 plans prior to vehicle platformer that would have been amazing. A remake of Banjo-Kazooie except things are slightly off and start to change. The duo start noticing something is off. Great idea. The second idea was, Grunty chasing BK around all game annoying them as they play a traditionally collectathon. Also great!

So what happened? Rare happened. This has never been Microsoft's fault. It has been well documented that while making stages for what was a traditional Banjo game, Rare realized they were too big. It would be tedious. So here we are, Rare didn't listen again to criticisms of their last 2 collectathons. So now they have to solve the problem of traversing this world. "Vehicle Platformer solves our problems!" And thus, Nuts n Bolts became what it is.

It is hard for me to believe Rare is that incompetent to not know what fans expect from a Banjo sequel. They knew people expected a collectathon platformer where they learn new moves to traverse the world. It is beyond me why they thought vehicle platformer was a good idea. They even knew fans would hate it as they tried to minimize the blowback by saying, play it before you complain. So here is another case of Rare not listening to fans.

Let's talk more about the game itself and why it's not a bad game like many claim. It's building mechanics are great. It has a robust physics engine that feels mostly great. It can be fun to build your own monstrosity of a vehicle to solve one puzzle. It is satisfying. The game looks good too.

The hub world is also really neat. It's the most the games feels like traditional Banjo. A lot of it is done on foot. The music as usual is very good as well.

The problem here is that it's not Banjo. Even Grant Kurkope, the composer for all Banjo music said, "Nuts n Bolts isn't a bad game. It just should never have been a Banjo game." There are so many times, you just want to get out of your vehicle and just solve stuff on foot as you did in all other Banjo games. That expectation and urge to do that would not be there if this didn't have a Banjo skin on it.

Another way Rare shows utter contempt for Banjo fans is by actively taunting them. A character called Lord of Games aka LOG actively makes fun of the players by mentioning collectathons and platforms as things no one wants to play anymore. LOG does this a lot. It's a bad look. Rare knowing that they made something that fans of Banjo would not like or expect from the series and actively pushing their buttons. Actively telling them their nostalgia is bad. And then wondering, why do they hate us and this game so much?

I will say, I don't hate the art style. It works. Is it my favorite, no. Do I hate it, no. They wanted to modernize it. That's fine. It makes sense. We are no longer on the N64. It's a good middle ground.

Stop n Swap comes to it's final conclusion here. It unlocks some building materals for your vehicles. Cool? I guess. It's just disappointing that 10 years of Stop n Swap and it literally being revived amounted up to, some custom parts in a vehicle platformer no one asked for or wanted.

The story is cute, but yet again, LOG ruins it. The stages are neat. Some are infuriating to get around. One being very cramped and vertical. So any slight mistake with the loose controls will send you falling down and failing the challenge.
Banjo Land is a pleasure though as it takes old assets from BK 1 and 2. That was a great trip back into nostalgia. But yet again, our nostalgia is bad, right LOG!? Even though you made a whole level based on nostalgia.

There is only so many types of challenges you can do with vehicles. So the game gets repeatitive. And if you are bad at being creative with building vehicles it just get frustrating. Things get harder and harder yet you have to change up your vehicle for each challenge. Make it better than ever before. And that is the major flaw of the gameplay loop. It's all based on your ability to make good vehicles. If you are not able to do that, then it isn't fun.

This isn't a bad game. It just should never have been a Banjo game. It proves that Rare just didn't listen criticism and didn't care about what fans wanted. And then this will lead directly into Yooka-Laylee and the problems it has.

A sequel that is still fun but flawed.

I still have a love for this game. It improves on some things but falters in others. And this is just another part of the story of how Rare didn't listen to criticism.

Where last left off with DK64(Go check my review of it so this makes a bit more sense.). The biggest problem with Tooie is that worlds are yet again too big. They are tedious to get around. It requires a stupid amount of backtracking. You have to get a move 2 world from now and then return to get this jiggy. Worlds are not self contained anymore. They actually connect in insane ways. You can do things in one world that effects another. It's cool but it also leads to tedium. They tried to add warp pads in worlds like DK64 but it doesn't really solve the problem.

Now, why am I mentioning DK64 so much? It's because it came out a year before this. And they learned nothing! They were told how tedious it was. They were told the worlds were too big. Yet here we are, with Banjo-Tooie having the same issues. The one thing they did improve is there is way less to collect in Tooie than there is in DK64. Rare simply did not listen to very valid criticisms.

Now, let's compare it to Banjo-Kazooie. It is a sequel after all. What does it improve it on? Note count no longer resets on death or exit of a level. You can now collect packs of notes instead one 1 note at a time. The overworld is a bit more interesting than the first. Although I feel like Grunty's Castle is a better vibe and theme. Ilse of Hags has more variety and there is more life going on. It has more moves to learn. Moves are more varied and all of them are used more. We get a lot more lore about the world. We also get what most people wanted and that was, to see Kazooie out of the backpack.

A cavoite to the separation move though. It does lead to tedium. Gotta find a pad to do it. Got to find a pad to switch. Got to separate in order to learn individual moves. It does lead to tedium but it was still a cool thing to do.

As usual, the worlds are varied. Most are fun. Later levels get to be a bit too much. Music is great as always. The final boss is honestly less frustrating. Dare I say, it's fun? Or at least very close to fun.

There are a few incredibly frustrating jiggies. Cough CANARY MARY cough. Some of the timers in the game are very tight. Like unfair tight. Some of the mini games suck due to bad controls.

One cool thing is the addition of a Golden Eye like multiplayer minigame. It's really fun with friends. You have to deal with the bad controls, but the 360 version does it fix it.

How does the Xbox 360 version improve on Tooie? Not much to be honest. It improves some controls. Stop n Swap lives on in this version. You get some player icons/profile pictures and a wallpaper for your 360. It looks better. I believe you could select a boss rush mode and play all the mini games from the menu.

I know I complained a lot about it. But I do love this game. I'm harsh because it needs to be said. It is not better than the first game, but not a bad sequel. It is just another example of Rare, not listening.

I know what some people are going to say. They were developed to close together. They couldn't change it even though they knew the criticisms of DK64. Fair enough. Here is the thing though. That's a trend with Rare. DKC 1, 2 and 3 were all released with 1 year of in between each other. 94, 95, 96. Bk1, DK64 and BK2 did the same thing. 98, 99, 00. Do you see the problem there?

I'm not going to go into much but DKC 3 is a mess of a game. It's not as well regarded because Rare didn't polish it like the other two. Bad hitboxes, worse graphics, worse music, etc. They simply didn't have the time.

Yet again, I know what some of you are gonna say. It's not Rare's fault they had to pump out so many games in a short amount of time. Yet again, fair enough.

I just need to paint the picture of why Tooie is the way it is. And how all of this effects not only Banjo-Kazooie Nuts n Bolts but Yooka-Laylee. I'm telling a story here of how they did not listen to criticism. Did not learn from their mistakes with DK64 and Tooie.

Go check out my Banjo-Tooie N64 review to get my full thoughts on the game. I will share the part of my review that specifically talks about the 360 version here though.

How does the Xbox 360 version improve on Tooie? Not much to be honest. It improves some controls. Stop n Swap lives on in this version. You get some player icons/profile pictures and a wallpaper for your 360. It looks better. I believe you could select a boss rush mode and play all the mini games from the menu. It also improves the controls the the first person mode.

I do love this game. It is not better than the first game, but not a bad sequel.