Dead Rising 4 is such a strange case of a game. It’s vilified by fans as the worst game in the franchise and after playing it’s very clear why. The thing about the game though is that it’s not, “one of the worst games I’ve ever played,” or some 1 out of 10. What it really is, is a painfully average game that completely lost the identity of the Dead Rising franchise. On the surface it’s very easy to think they fell into the trap of making a game that’ll appeal to everyone, but that doesn’t even feel like it’s the case. What really shows in the final product though is the nightmarish development this game went through. I’m not going to lay it all out for you, I’m sure other reviewers have already and there’s some great videos online explaining it but the basics you should know is that a series of bad decisions led to this game being developed without the founder of the development studio, the original executive producers for this game, the lead writer for all of Dead Rising 2 & 3, and about 40% of the studio’s original staff. It puts a lot of things into perspective really. Why is Frank completely different than in previous games? Well that’s because the executive producers who’d originally pitched his return got fired and the long time lead writer left of her own accord; meaning those who took up the helm didn’t know and understand Frank West. Why does everything feel half-baked and lacking? Well the game was developed on only 75% of the original time and resources in addition to having a severely reduced staff. I could say more there, but you hopefully get the point. They weren’t trying to make a bad game but they ended up in a situation where they were bound to fail.

Now none of that excuses the flaws of the game, I just wanted to put them into perspective and if you want to say, “cry me a river,” that’s totally justified. What we ultimately got here is what, to me, feels like Dead Rising’s Resident Evil 6. A game that went outside the story and gameplay that fans have come to expect over the years and ultimately created something that’s not awful, but also isn’t great either. There’s fun to be had in Dead Rising 4, but in order to find it you really have to be someone that’s simply not a fan of Dead Rising; because what it is, is essentially a generic open world hack n’ slash with a zombies theme. I played this immediately following fresh playthroughs of the prior games and now that I’m done I can honestly say that I don’t have any interest in playing it again and I also don’t have any interest in picking up the DLC for the, equally as bad, true ending. The best thing I got out of playing this game, as a fan of the series as a whole, is that I now have a greater appreciation for the series as a whole and the efforts they made to make the earlier games stand out.

So many things have been simplified here for one reason or another and it creates a very casual experience that gets boring quickly. Due to character limits, and me trying to not write a college essay, I can only touch on these so much, but hopefully you get the points.

Survivors feel pointless in this game. The thing with survivors is that rather than being crafted NPCs with their own minor personality traits they’re literally just all generic NPCs. The reason for this is that survivors are now almost entirely radiant quests. There’s really no reason to be saving them too because the PP they award you now is like crumbs compared to what it used to be.

Something that hasn’t been simplified and yet feels worse than ever is the map. I personally didn’t enjoy the bigger map of Dead Rising 3, because despite the size, it lacked things to do since the majority of buildings and businesses were inexplicably closed off. Now in Dead Rising 4 you have an even larger map and most of the buildings are accessible, but there’s no reason to go in most of them. What I found is that a lot of the buildings you can enter don’t contain anything of value. I think this became very apparent to me too when I’d reached the end of Case 5 and noticed I had 44 of the 55 combo blueprints but I’d only used maybe 3 or 4 of them regularly. This wasn’t because I didn’t like the other combo weapons, I didn’t like any of them in general, I simply couldn’t find the things to make them most of the time because you see the same few items pretty much everywhere. Just to mention it quickly too, this game has an Ubisoft amount of collectibles to waste your time.

A very important thing I need to touch on is combat because all the depth has been wiped away from it. You can no longer do heavy attacks or throw your weapon, instead you can only spam your basic attack and once getting a high enough streak you can execute a special attack similar to Dead Rising 3. The thing is though, unlike Dead Rising 3 where you built up a kill streak, you’re now building up a hit streak. Once you’ve hit, or shot, enemies enough times you can execute a special attack same as before, but with much less exciting attacks. Any basic, non-combo weapon, will simply trigger an animation where Frank executes a zombie. Combo weapons don’t get these, instead they all trigger some form of AoE attack. The reason for this change is likely because combo weapons no longer earn you additional PP for kills. Yes, you did read that correctly. Combo weapons no longer earn you additional PP because every kill you get regardless of it being with a melee weapon, gun, throwable, or car will always award you the same small amount of PP per kill. Despite that being the case though the combo weapons still don’t offer any real advantage because by design the number of enemies you kill isn’t meant to matter as much as how many times you can hit them in a short period. This is shown to be the case through the skill system. Despite having 107 skills in the game not a single one of them increases your damage. There’s also a skill now that awards you incrementally larger amounts of PP the higher you build your hit streak, meaning killing enemies faster is considered a bad thing in this game! What this results in is extremely underwhelming and weak combo weapons that offer no real incentive to use them. Remember the laser sword from other Dead Rising games? Remember how it would instantly slice zombies in half? Not here, here you’re going to be hitting them multiple times with it before they die because killing them instantly would hurt your hit streak. Something interesting I noticed after experimenting towards the end of the game is that there’s really no disadvantage to using standard weapons on anything but boss enemies. Most of them do similar damage to zombies since you’re not meant to kill them fast and the AoE from combo weapons is generally not effective due to you killing all the nearby zombies while building up the streak to use it.

Just to touch on them very quickly too, combo vehicles. They’re back and I can describe them with one word: forgettable. You’ll never find the vehicles you need to make them without going out of your way and given that, again, hits matter more than kills, driving a normal car is better in a lot of ways. A normal car is extremely durable too, I didn’t have a single one break despite never upgrading their durability.

I’ll wrap this up with a quick lightning round of some other things. The camera returns but doesn’t award PP so it’s really just here for story mechanics, the inventory system change removed the depth of managing your inventory, exo-suits is a cool idea but boring in practice, and psychos were replaced with generic themed NPCs that are forgettable.

This game is certainly not one of the worst I’ve played, but it’s not one I’d recommend picking up. If you’re looking for a zombies sandbox I’d like to direct you to Dead Rising 3 instead since it pretty much does every aspect of this game better.

Horribly optimized to the point it sucks any fun to be had out of the game. Don't bother.

The games fun, I like that the developers have included access to more ranged weapons. I would recommend this game for fans of zombie games that are looking to battle large groups of zombies.