Raising The Dead Tree

We’re back again with more zombie action this week. I’m talking about my most recent zombie acquisition: Dead Rising 3. It’s no secret that I love zombies and the Dead Rising series has been one of my favourites—the wacky weapons and open world have always made these games a ton of fun—and they’ve evolved over time, implementing new ideas well and adapting to changes and issues that arose in the previous iterations.

Dead Rising at its core is one thing: killing a ton of zombies, and there's nothing wrong with that! Over the years they've come up with more and more interesting ways to kill, maim and utterly destroy your zombie foes and the psychopaths that litter the post apocalyptic landscape of the games. In Dead Rising 3 however, they did a lot of cool things that solved a lot of smaller problems I had in the last two games, first of which was allowing you to create combo weapons on the spot. Now if you haven't played any games in the series I’ll elaborate: since Dead Rising 2, the games have allowed you to create more powerful weapons by combining two or more items. These weapons do more damage, give more XP and are more durable making them the better option in the long run. Now in the previous game you could only create them at crafting stations dotted along the map, but in Dead Rising 3 they’ve removed the crafting stations all together allowing you to create these badass weapons anywhere you want. There is a trade off though, you can only create items that you’ve found the blueprints for, which is a huge difference and somewhat limiting because in the last game you didn't need the combo card to create a weapon, it only served to show you a possible combo and make it stronger. This subtle change is surprisingly frustrating when you’re holding two items that you know go together but can’t do anything with because you haven’t found the blueprint that tells you so.

With that being said, this is a small complaint and after a while of collecting you’ll have all the blueprints you could want or need, it’s just a mild frustration when you find a baseball bat and a box of nails and your character has no clue what to do with them.

Another large portion of the gameplay is spent on combo cars which are basically a necessity for getting around the city. Now don’t get me wrong, it’s not that this isn’t an awesome addition to the franchise, I just wish it had been better implemented because a fairly large percentage of the game is spent traveling between the three major city hubs, across these massive bridges and roadways which are absolutely flooded with the previously living, so you are pretty much required to do a lot of driving which becomes tedious pretty quickly. The game really could've used a fast travel mechanic, at least to put you in a spot somewhere in each city, allowing you to hop around a lot quicker but instead they left you with the combo cars as your only real option, which while fun, lose their appeal pretty quickly as you slowly plow through an ungodly amount of zombies on all the roads.

The game itself is fun - don’t get me wrong - there are just small things that I found really slowed down the game and were kind of a take away from the previous version. All in all, the game is still a ton of fun and has a great story, the new weapons and combos are awesome and creative, and the gameplay is tons of fun. There's just a few small kinks that slow down the game. If you're a fan of the series or looking for a new game to play, I’d recommend giving this a try.