Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster is the best the Dead Rising franchise has ever been. Dead Rising 1 has always had the best map, and the least dumb story (I hesitate to say "best" because the story is still hella dumb), in the series, and now the gameplay and presentation have been polished up to truly represent the ideal of what the franchise is supposed to be.
If you want to see this article in video form, the video posted below uses the same script.
Mind you, I say that as someone that actually does like Dead Rising 3 and 4 a lot - I'm not one of those psychos that hates Dead Rising 4 and can't explain why - I like all of the games, but Dead Rising 1 has always been my favorite even if the gameplay improved in later entries pretty significantly. Dead Rising 1 is a "Dawn of the Dead" (Romero, not Snyder, thank you) surviving in a mall fantasy delivered almost perfectly.
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The Deluxe Remaster makes that fantasy even easier to enjoy. The gameplay is faster and more responsive. XP requirements to level up have been adjusted so it's easier and faster to unlock everything you need in order to have the most fun possible. Other annoying rough edges in certain boss fights / missions have been sanded off. Survivor A.I. is much, much better. The whole experience is smoother and more enjoyable.
It might seem silly to pay $50 for this game again in 2024, but it's worth it. It falls into that gray area between remake and remaster since it is still the guts of the original game - level geometry, physics, etc. are all the same - but running on a new much prettier graphical engine that is such an improvement they probably could have called it a remake and gotten away with it. Capcom has set a pretty high standard for what it calls "remakes", though, with the Resident Evil 2, 3, and 4 remakes, so it's understandable why they would set expectations the way they did by calling this the Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster instead.
The game is great looking with fantastic lighting and shadows that really set the game apart from the original release or the 2016 remaster. At night, the mall is really genuinely dark, and seeing the red glowing eyes of hundreds of zombies is truly creepy. And the outdoor park area is full of trees and shadows now, too, which makes it extra scary at night. And, by the way, the convicts have better A.I. now so they don't just run into trees constantly, but they still aren't too hard if you know what you're doing (yes, I know most people don't know what they're doing and struggle with them, but that ain't my problem).
I really made this video because I want to give special attention to the infinity mode, which is what I'm playing in this footage I'm talking over. Infinity mode is a survival mode where your health is constantly going down from hunger, in addition to any damage you take from enemies, so you have to constantly eat food to get it back. Food is scarce, though, with only a finite amount spread around the mall - plus any food other survivors you come across drop when you kill them (don't worry, everyone is hostile in this mode) - and it's really, really hard to actually survive. The Deluxe Remaster version of the mode is better than the original because it's a bit easier, but that makes it more fun and less stressful than it was before.
The gameplay loop is basically this - you go collect as much food as Frank can hold, and then you find a safe place to let time pass and eat food when you need to. In the old version, you had to go make Frank eat something every 18-minutes or so in real time while he was hiding somewhere, and it was pretty boring and took 14-hours of real time(!) to survive for 7 days in game. In this new version, you can fast forward time at save spots, so you collect food, hide, fast forward, eat, fast forward, eat, etc. until you ran out of food and have to find it again. It cuts the total time down from 14+ hours to much, much, much less than that.
The other change in the Deluxe Remaster version of infinity mode is that the food supply isn't actually finite this time around. There's still only so much food sitting out at the stores and such, but now it isn't just other survivors that can drop food but cult members (of which there are hundreds) and special forces have a chance to drop food items as well. There is a risk/reward, of course, because special forces can chew your health up extremely quickly if you aren't extremely careful and or extremely lucky, but if everything works out you actually can collect more than enough food to survive for 7 days and even beyond. It makes the mode a lot more exciting and fun since you aren't just hiding for 14 hours like in the original.
I really think infinity mode is the best way to play Dead Rising. It's so fun. You do have to play through the story and get through overtime mode to unlock infinite mode, but it's totally worth it.
Dead Rising has always been one of my all time favorite games and I'm pleased to say the Deluxe Remaster improves on it significantly. It looks better. It plays better. It always had great replay value, but the adjustments to infinity mode mean you'll be hooked all over again and won't mind paying full MSRP. It's a fantastic overall package that I highly recommend to both old and new fans.
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