Dead Rising 4

Dead Rising 4 has some obvious flaws, like a shallow story, poorly executed co-op and the difficulty level that is nonexistent for anyone who has a tiniest bit of gaming experience, but I honestly enjoyed killing almost 15.000 zombies throughout the campaign. [02/2017, p.26]

The developers made a great effort as fighting hordes of zombies is as fun as ever. The story was very enjoyable with a satisfying ending. But some design choices really hurt the game at the end such as generic side quests and a disappointing online mode.

While there’s certainly a cathartic sense of enjoyment to be found in making light work of tens of thousands of zombies using the large and crazy array of weapons that are available in Dead Rising 4, the removal of campaign co-op, psychopaths being replaced by forgettable maniacs, and the lack of any challenge due to the removal of the in-game timer really highlight that the gameplay that is on offer is shallow. If you liked Dead Rising 3, you’ll no doubt find some sense of enjoyment in Dead Rising 4. For everyone else, it’s not going to convince you otherwise.

Dead Rising 4 is an amazing game that gives you the opportunity to go ballistic on hordes of zombies. But, it does not offer a lot more than just that.

Dead Rising 4 has deviated too much from its own traditions for me to give it a wholehearted recommendation. It now resembles a typical modern day third-person sandbox game, for what that's worth. To be fair, I have a lot of fun with games like that, and I've been having a lot of fun with this game. But Dead Rising has come and gone, and has been replaced with something a little tamer and more accessible.

Dead Rising 4 evokes much of the same style and quirkiness that the first two games did, but ultimately isn’t able to spread that fun across the entire experience.

On many levels Dead Rising 4 is a disappointment, content to riff on the slapstick violence and revive past glories but showing no real desire to do anything new. There's precious little depth and the combat is shallow, while some sections seem designed to show up Frank's inability to cope with tooled-up human foes. Yet there's something weirdly cheerful and festive about Frank's misadventures, about crafting homebrew weaponry and putting it to work.

Dead Rising 4 is certainly good, but it’s still not as good as it could have been.

It's fitting, somehow, that a game series so lovingly modeled after a famous B-movie would itself result in a B-tier game. Dead Rising 4 is uneven and less polished than many other games this fall. It's the kind of light, airy game I would have expected earlier in the year, when it wouldn't risk being swallowed up by the holiday season. At its core it's a pulp adventure, with winking witticisms and bloody messes strewn throughout. That makes it, if not entirely memorable, at least a bloody good time that understands the ephemeral nature of camp.

While it’s massively enjoyable for the greater part, if you didn’t like Dead Rising 3, you likely aren’t going to like its successor. Even though some nice improvements and additions have been made this time around, there’s not enough that would really cause anyone to change their mind about the franchise. If you did enjoy Capcom’s last open-world zombie-chopping romp though, you’re in for another wild and entertaining ride.

Dead Rising 4 sees the franchise's original hero forced back into action in a sequel that's bigger than any entry in the series before, yet feels more empty and bereft of excitement than its predecessors.

Dead Rising 4 feels like yet another one of those games. I love the series, and DR4 will satisfy my thirst for yet another entry. It felt good to get back into Frank’s shoes, and the Christmas theme is fantastic. The lack of story co-op is the biggest offender, and I wasn’t a fan of how much the game seems to throw at players. This seems like a perfect example of less could be so much more, but as it stands Dead Rising 4 is a solid entry in the long-running series.

The removal of the timer from as compared to past games might not bode well with fans of the series, but it allows others a sense of freedom to move within the game at their own accord. That all said, there just isn’t enough to keep you engaged apart from the main storyline; killing zombies with crazy theatrical weapons is fun, but after a while it just becomes too much of a grind.

Dead Rising 4 is a fun game, the Christmas theme is fantastic and the online multiplayer is pretty fun as well, however being a good game does NOT make this a good Dead Rising game.

Even if still fun when managing mountains of zombies with crazy weapons of all kinds, Dead Rising 4 fails to diversify enough of its gameplay from the previous game, making even a backward step in the variety, graphics and overall charisma departments.

At times it feels like a reanimated corpse itself, but as mindless and predictable as it may be Dead Rising 4 is as much fun as the series has ever been.

Dead Rising 4 is a good game which takes most of the previous mechanics but forgets, once again, to implement the time limit we loved in the first episode. Some will be pleased, but the hardcore fans of the series won't.

Forget the first chapter, forget the time limits and everything that made the first chapter a real survival horror. This is just an entertaining action game, and a Dead Rising for dummies.

Dead Rising 4 maintains the series' tradition of superficial yet entertaining mayhem by adapting ideas from every previous iteration.

Dead Rising 4 does not do enough to deserve a new number in the title; it feels more like an add-on to DR3 than anything else. And what it does change, it changes for worse: DR3 had had very gratifying “zombie genocide” gameplay, but now the undead are so weak, our West didn’t die a single time over the whole playthrough. [Issue#215, p.58]

Quotation forthcoming.

The return of Frank West and Willamette is not enough to turn Dead Rising 4 into a competent video game. The absence of the iconic time trial turns the title in one of the easiest rides of the franchise. Good multiplayer and brainless (but fun) zombie massacre, but Capcom Vancouver is lost in the Dead Rising roots.

As far as Dead Rising games go, Dead Rising 4 may be dumbed down, but it’s still dumb fun.

It's hard to complain too much about the absence of peril when you're wearing the bottom half of a chicken suit. [Feb 2017, p.114]

Despite a few improvements, Dead Rising 4 falls short in too many areas to earn a recommendation. A passable entry in the zombie slaying franchise that wastes the return of its original hero.

The Dead Rising brand should give itself a short break. The fourth episode had almost slipped into average, saved only by a perfect combination of weapons and creative ways how to deal with zombies. [Issue #271]

It’s disappointing that Dead Rising 4 sees the series take a backward step. While there’s gory fun to be had, the failure to replace the time-limit based gameplay with any kind of alternative mechanic is a mistake. Even the biggest fan of zombie-killing frivolity will find that the endless slaughter wears thin eventually, and most will hit that particular wall much sooner.

Dead Rising 4 has obvious flaws. It is not a great technical game, has a lot of bugs, and it does not run as well as a lot of other games on console. It still manages to entertain with it’s humor, but it is a flawed game.

Dead Rising 4 offers players a chance to explore a zombie-infested open-world at their own leisure and kill throngs of enemies ad nauseam. While it’s fun to dispatch zombies with a multitude of toys, things quickly get repetitive and the lack of difficulty removes the excitement of overcoming the horde.

Dead Rising 4 takes a few steps forward in terms of the gameplay mechanics, but also takes a giant zombie-infected shamble backwards in regards to the narrative elements. Taking away the ticking clock, making the maniacs nothing more than a mere annoyance instead of the stuff of nightmares, and having civilians easily rescued really pulled away from what I liked in the previous games. Dead Rising 4 is fun, but it’s also a little hollow and it’s lost a significant chunk of the series’ soul.

Dead Rising 4 is disappointing on several levels, but above all, it's hard not to stress that the IP seems to reach some solid boundaries. It's maybe time for Capcom to let it rest for some time.

Although the weapons and the exo-suit elevate the core action of Dead Rising 4, the lack of timer takes away the challenge and the replayability. The current build also has a lot of bugs, unfortunately.

Dead Rising 4 is like a digital stress ball. It can be cathartic to let loose and kill thousands of zombies whenever you want, but it doesn’t have much else going for it, even with the charming Christmas setting and a compelling multiplayer mode. If you’re a diehard Dead Rising fan, you might get more out of the story than I did. Like the characters mentioned earlier, the narrative is not very interesting and mostly served as a way to push me to different parts of the map.

Dead Rising 4 is a passably entertaining and wholly unnecessary return to a series that’s growing more redundant with each succeeding release.

Lack of Psychos, lack of timer and time limits, easy to build combo weapons which are overpowered btw, a leveling system that makes the game easier than it already is and a story that makes no sense. Dead Rising is turned into to a laughable excuse of a zombie sandbox game. Wait, wasn’t that an extra mode in Dead Rising Off the Record? Prefer the Remastered Collection.