Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster Review

ign.com:

Shambling out of the seventh-generation graveyard for its second remaster, Capcom at least deserves credit for bringing Dead Rising itself in line with accepted zombie lore. That is, it too is now officially a stubborn corpse that refuses to stay dead. However, Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster earns credit for more than just that. Capcom has injected a series of smart tweaks to the gameplay that make surviving a zombie-infested mall less frustrating than it was 20 years ago, but it does so while still preserving the feel of the original’s challenging, time-limited experience. Combined with a fresh visual overhaul, the result is easily the best way to play what’s still the best Dead Rising game – even if the occasionally creaky combat is certainly showing its age through a modern lens.

Remasters and remakes of already strong video games can be a little hard to appraise. They can be fantastic yet inescapably inessential, like The Last of Us Part 1 – a remake of an existing, excellent remaster that was already hard to fault on a console just a single generation old. Alternatively, they can be literally nothing more than a small resolution bump, like the 2019 remaster of 2009’s Ghostbusters: The Video Game. I adore Ghostbusters but, aside from saving it from being marooned on PS3 on Sony’s side of the fence, what did re-publishing it as a bespoke product achieve that the ‘Enhanced’ 4K updates delivered to dozens of Xbox 360 games for free did not?

In fairness, Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster makes a far clearer case for itself, because it isn’t just slightly better looking. Crucially, it’s also a better game to play.

For clarity, this is not a ground-up do-over in the same spirit as its undead Capcom cousins, though it is driven by the same RE Engine that powers all recent Resident Evil remakes. Cutscenes and conversations are all running on the same rigging, and it does largely feel like the 2006 classic is chugging away under the glossy surface most of the time.

It is a vast