Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster is a breath of rotting flesh air… in a good way

thesixthaxis.com:

You just can’t keep a zombie game down, can you? Much like the undead that have invaded the land of the living, it feels almost inevitable that zombie games will spawn sequels, no matter how long and arduous the development becomes, receive lavish remakes and reimaginings, or at the very least end up firmly lodged in the games industry discourse for several years.

Launching on the 18th anniversary of the Willamette Incident, Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster is the latest in a slew of zombie games that are clawing themselves back into the public eye. We’re absolutely here for it.

Capcom has shown a mastery of classic game remakes over the past half decade, through the excellent reimagining of earlier parts of the Resident Evil series. Resi 2 and 3 were given a complete makeover with modern third-person gameplay at their core, and while Resi 4 was closer to the original in that it already featured third-person camera, there was still plenty of space for modernising the controls and feel of the game.

You could argue that Dead Rising, by contrast, doesn’t need anywhere near as much work to feel like a contemporary game. Coming out in the first year of the Xbox 360’s life, the sandbox setting and gameplay, the number of zombies being shown on screen, the menagerie of silly and playful ways to kill them, and the generally tongue-in-cheek tone all play well close to two decades later. Perhaps that’s why so much of this has been kept intact for Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster, though I’d still argue that branding this as a remaster, deluxe or otherwise, is a huge misnomer.

For one thing, this is just as much of a remake as Resi 4 was. The game has been reconstructed within RE Engine, all of the character models have been remade, the shopping mall has been given a major spruce up and large parts of the environment redesigned, and there’s plenty of other tweaks and changes throughout. The core gameplay might be practically the same, but this is a remake through and through.

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