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.