Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster is the perfect setup for a new sequel

Dead Rising knew exactly what it was. Keiji Inafune’s B-movie zombie smash-em-up is a quintessential Xbox 360 game. A relic of the transition from SD to HD, while some companies focused on hyper-realistic graphics that have aged terribly, Capcom focused on shoving as many zombies on screen as possible.

From a core gameplay perspective, Dead Rising is just as fun to play in 2024 as it was in 2006, a testament to its simple loop, and campy slapstick horror. If you’ve not had the pleasure of liberating the heads from the shoulders of the zombies of Willamette before, Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster also serves as a great way to get into the series.

You play as Frank West, an Ant McPartlin lookalike-come-photojournalist who’s on the hunt for the next big scoop. Quickly he finds himself trapped in a mall, teeming with both zombies and survivors, and only three days to save everyone he can. Dead Rising’s gimmick is that every mission is on a timer, which is measured by an in-game clock that is constantly counting down. If you miss a survivor because you didn’t get to them on time, they’re dead for that run.

Frank can murder zombies with everything that’s not nailed to the floor, as well as dress up in dozens of lavish costumes. It’s a hugely silly, incredibly fun third-person action game that we were thrilled to have an excuse to go back to.

For veterans, Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster is Dead Rising as you remember it. It’s not a remake on the level of Resident Evil 2, 3 or 4, but it cleans up the grime and sands down the rough edges to make the game look modern enough and play much better.

While you can move while you aim, the save system is far more forgiving, Capcom hasn’t ripped the foundations out of the original game. You can almost see exactly where remake-style changes could have happened. The mall is still segmented, despite technology meaning a fully open mall would have been simple. The UI is still basic and blocky, almost like it’s still being designed to be read on an SD TV, as was the standard in 2006.

Changes from later entries aren’t brought back to the first game either. There are no weapon combos from Dead Rising 2, for example. Where changes have been made include some smart ones, like making the quest surrounding two Japanese tourists less Little Britain, and some that feel like they take away from the game’s tone.

The in-game photography minigame has been changed so that now, Frank no longer scores points for “erotica,” photos. This means that one of the original game’s side quests had to change.

We can absolutely see why Capcom did this. From an outside perspective, the idea of a mission surrounding taking pictures of women’s blocky polygonal bodies is very 2006, FHM, lad culture humour, but that betrays what we think was the actual point of it in the first place.

“Frank can murder zombies with everything that’s not nailed to the floor, as well as dress up in dozens of lavish costumes. It’s a hugely silly, incredibly fun third-person action game that we were thrilled to have an excuse to go back to.”

Frank West is a sleazy, sweaty pap whose sole reason for saving people and exploring the mall is to get the perfect shot. The idea that in this time of crisis, while he’s watching people die in the thousands, he’s still looking for that titillating angle, is very on brand.

It’s easy to see why it was taken out because it’s far easier to do that than to expect a drive-by observer to get into the nuisances and satire of Frank West, but it feels like an area of the game that didn’t need to be buffed out.

Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster has an incredibly addictive core loop. By core loop, we mean the loop around the parking garage that we spent literally hours circling in order to get the last few trophies. Even if you didn’t play the original, the idea of exploring through a zombie-infested mall, meeting strange characters, and saving survivors is a gameplay concept that holds up very well.

We’d struggle to think of another game from its era that manages to feel as fun to play in 2024, with the concession that some changes have been made under the hood in order to accommodate the time that has passed.

Now, calls over your radio aren’t constantly interrupted, and you can receive them while wielding a weapon, which is a fantastic change. You can now have as many survivors following you as you’d like, and there’s even a new mechanic where survivors can have certain items that they prefer, making them more survivable in the mall.

It really does feel like Capcom knows this is probably the last time its going back to this game for a long time, so it was as important to make it a “Definitive” edition was it was a Deluxe Remaster. Even some cut content from the original game has been restored, thank you to fans who’ve stuck with Frank since 2006.

“We’d struggle to think of another game from its era that manages to feel as fun to play in 2024, with the concession that some changes have been made under the hood in order to accommodate the time that has passed.”

Ultimately, by the time we’d finished Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster, we were ready for what’s next. A Dead Rising 2 Deluxe Remaster would go down a treat and is likely to follow, but what we really want is Dead Rising 5.

The series lost its way with 3, and the less said about 4 the better, but in the current Capcom era where the company seems to be incapable of a misstep, a proper Dead Rising sequel in the style of one and two has massive potential.

Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster is a great way to play the game on current platforms. Even if it’s not one-to-one with the original, and some may have expected some bigger remake-style changes to the haunted halls of Willamette Parkview Mall, it’s still a joy to play in 2024.

A copy of Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster was supplied by Capcom for this review.