One of the best selling, zombie-killing, videogame franchises has come to the Xbox One, and it’s bigger, more exciting, and more violent than ever. Capcom’s “Dead Rising” franchise started in 2006 with “Dead Rising” for the Xbox 360. This game was revolutionary for its time, placing you in the shoes of a photojournalist who is stuck in a mall and pitting you against huge hordes of the undead. The gameplay mostly consisted of using absolutely anything and everything as a weapon as you fight off hordes of zombies and try to survive three days in the mall as you uncover the secrets behind the zombie outbreak.
The franchise has come a very long way since then, releasing two other games before hitting the next-generation console. “Dead Rising 3” revolves around protagonist Nick Ramos, a mechanic who is trapped inside the fictional city of Los Peridados. The city has recently been quarantined by the military after an outbreak of a virus that turned almost its entire population into the bloodthirsty infected. The game requires the player to team up with other survivors and escape Los Peridados before the military drops bombs on the city, destroying everything. Throughout the game, the player can go on various missions and gain experience, thereby upgrading Nick and making him stronger, faster, and more agile when fighting the undead.
The “Dead Rising” series has alway been praised for ingeniously creative and sometimes comical methods of disposing of the infected enemy, and “Dead Rising 3” gets even more creative when it comes to the crazy weapons that the player is able to use. Not only is the player able to pick up almost anything that they find in the city and use it as a weapon, but they are able to combine the weapons as well, giving them a much better advantage over the stumbling zombies. These weapons can range from the incredibly vicious, like the Gun Blade (a shotgun mounted on a machete), to the overly silly, like the Freedom Bear (a large teddy bear wielding two light machine guns). The player is also able to drive and combine different vehicles in the game in order to cause some insanely bloody mayhem in the streets.
All of these things are necessary in order to survive, because the number of zombies that the player must face is astoundingly large. The game certainly put the power of the Xbox One to the test, at times fitting enormous mobs or hundreds of zombies on screen at once. Amazingly enough, the gameplay remains smooth and slick as you chop, hack, shoot, and drive your way through these large masses.
While the feeling of being a total zombie-killing badass is initially very exciting, the gameplay can get repetitive once you’ve found and tested out all the different combinations of weapons. “Dead Rising 3” adds a Co-Op mode in which the player can team up with a friend and explore the open world, encountering zombies as they go. This too, however, can become dissatisfying. Regardless, “Dead Rising 3” is the strongest game in the franchise by far. It’s entertaining, and though it gets repetitive, there is still a sense of satisfaction that one can achieve when taking on a city full of the undead. “Dead Rising 3” is definitely a must-have game for the year 2014.