The Best Zombie Game Of All Time Is About to Get Even Better
Frank West is back in action.
You have 72 hours to survive the zombie apocalypse. Trapped in an all-American shopping mall and forced to scrounge for weapons and supplies. To keep yourself alive you’ll need to use everything you can find, from throwing plates like ninja stars, to massacring dozens of undead with a lawnmower.
Eighteen years after its release, Dead Rising remains one of the most immersive zombie games ever created — a fantastic confluence of frictional systems, time management, and dynamic storytelling. It’s a cult classic that would go on to create one of Capcom’s biggest series and inspired a handful of other games in the process. As beloved as it is, Dead Rising certainly shows its age, but that’s no longer an issue. After spending nearly a dozen hours with the Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster, Capcom has given one of its biggest cult classics a new lease on life with a gorgeous visual upgrade and a handful of smart gameplay changes. Dead Rising has never been better.
The Deluxe Remaster recasts nearly every character, and now features full voice acting, even for survivors.
For the purposes of this preview, we were able to play through the entire “72-hour mode” of Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster. Fans of the original game will know this is the main story mode of the game, where you survive 72 in-game hours (roughly six real hours) and pursue a number of “cases” to advance the story. As with the original game, there are additional unlockable modes after completing this, but we weren’t able to test any of those out.
In Dead Rising, you play the cocksure journalist Frank West, who received a hot tip at some kind of catastrophic event happening in Willamette, Colorado. Of course, he doesn’t expect a zombie outbreak and ends up trapped in the Willamette Parkview Mall with dozens of other survivors, federal agents, and a few psychopaths.
To get the obvious out of the way, the biggest upgrade with the Deluxe Remaster is the immense visual upgrade, and boy is it impressive. Dead Rising has been completely rebuilt using Capcom’s RE Engine, the same engine used in the Resident Evil remakes, and the upgrade here is immediately apparent. Character models look and move much more realistically, and the environments of the mall have been given the biggest facelift. Wonderland Plaza is a rainbow of neon lights, with its roller-coaster roaming above the mall’s floors, the food court is adorned with tacky signs of colorful mascots, and the butterflies lazily float around the park at the mall’s center.
Dead Rising’s delirious sense of humor is one of its biggest strengths, especially paired with the highly self-aware story.
After over nearly a dozen playthroughs, I know the Willamette Mall like the back of my hand, but the remaster is fascinating. The layout is the same yet the mall looks like a different beast — an opulent monument to the extremes of American society, where you’re constantly bombarded by ads, billboards, and speaker announcements. The original game was a brilliant subversion that critiqued the dangers of rampant capitalism, and the lavish reimaging of the game’s style feels like it leans into that idea even more.
The core appeal of Dead Rising has always been that survival fantasy, getting let loose in a mall where you can use anything and everything to destroy hundreds of zombies. That’s fun in and of itself, but Dead Rising also uses a fascinating time management system that genuinely demands a lot of the player. As you explore you need to manage time to play story missions, save survivors before they’re eaten by zombies, and finish side quests. Everything in Dead Rising is on a timer, and if you miss out on things that’s it, there’s no going back until you start a new game.
Out of all of Capcom’s games, Dead Rising has the most in common with this year’s Dragon’s Dogma 2, entirely because it’s such a demanding experience that requires the player to think and strategize. You need to learn the best shortcuts through the mall, need to remember where the best weapons are, adjust your strategy to deal with human attackers, etc. There are so many systems and mechanics working together in harmony.
The visual upgrade is particularly impressive for the mall’s environment.
I’m pleased to say that this complex spiderweb of systems has been virtually unchanged in the Deluxe Remaster. It’s still just as complex and obtuse as before, and that’s perfect. What has changed, however, are a handful of incredibly smart quality-of-life changes that help sand down Dead Rising’s rough edges.
The game’s controls have been updated to feel smoother and more intuitive, but also retain the weight and crunchiness of the original game. Weapon durability is now represented by a gauge underneath each weapon, meaning you don’t have to just guess how much longer your weapon will work. An autosave feature eliminates the frustration if a stray zombie takes you out when you haven’t saved in hours. Frank can now move while he aims and shoots weapons, and survivors you’re escorting will occasionally spot a PP Sticker that grants experience, marking it on your map.
All of these changes are small on their own, but add up to make the Deluxe Remaster much more satisfying and streamlined. All those crunchy systems are still there underneath, but Capcom has found smart ways to remove a lot of the frustration of the original Dead Rising, without changing its core identity. That’s the real key here. The development team clearly understood what made Dead Rising such a special game, and wanted to bring that experience to a new generation, just with a few extra bells and whistles.
The climactic “Psycho” boss battles are still a major highlight of Dead Rising.
The brilliance of Dead Rising is how it appeals to multiple different types of players. Want to just wander around a shiny mall and massacre zombies? Feel free. Want a gripping story full of camp and satire? Dead Rising has you covered.
The Deluxe Remaster is more than a reminder of why Dead Rising was such a seminal game, it feels like it fully captures the original vision. All of the fascinating systems and decisions are here, with little add-ons across the experience that tighten everything up.
I’ve beaten Dead Rising nearly a dozen times, and playing the Deluxe Remaster is like putting on your favorite sweater that you’ve had for a decade — only this time someone has patched the holes and fixed the frayed strings.
