Well, finished Dead Rising 3 in 22 hours with all side quests done and all collectibles found. Hit max attributes waaay before the end of my first run and without the PP rpg elements you're just left with the game design and oh boy is it pretty poor. Can anyone say overtime is any fun at all? That just leaves seeing the story through and the story sucks.
The game was ok. The DR formula is still fun, beating up zombies with all kinds of crazy weapons while wearing goofy clothes and exploring the game map and fighting occasional bosses. There were some really creative and fun weapons in this one and the music was pretty cool twilight zone-ish.
Now on the negatives, the weapons had a few that were too useful so there was really no point in using anything else since the larger zombie count meant you'd get swarmed more often. Elemental staff, Ultimate Scythe and Ultimate Shout pretty much took care of everything. The vehicles while a little fun, were few and non-varied and with all the driving they got boring real quick. Splitting the city up with driving just added a whole bunch of driving filler to make quests take longer as you went from one mini-city to the next.
The map was ok, but fairly generic and boring and the worst part is even when you memorized it all in your head, it never flowed well like DR1 & DR2's maps. In those games when doing quests later on after you got used to the map you'd find more efficient ways of getting from point A to point B quickly. Here, there's no shortcut, it always tedious driving.
Quests are pretty bad with a huge number simply asking for items so you run to a safe house grab them and come back; boring and tedious. There were a ton of survivors, but none were interesting. Psychopaths were lacking in number, insanity and quality fights; and secrets were mostly now a matter of ubi-soft chase your mini-map collecting hundreds of dots to fill bars (at least the combo plans gave new weapons). Even the hidden psychopath boss fights you would stumble upon are nowhere to be found.
The new casualized mode lacks the time management aspect of the original as quests have near infinite time and auto-saves everywhere take off the tension. Otoh, the old-school styled nightmare mode feels tacked on with not enough time to even do most of the quests and half the save points not marked on the map. In DR1 & 2, as you got stronger and more familiar with the map you'd get more efficient until you could get everything done in a run. Because of the driving tedious aspect, DR3 again feels lacking there. The game is quite long with all the side quests, approximately 2x the length of the previous games, however the extra length is not brought on by content but by dragging everything out through poor map design and endless driving.
The new leveling up system is also pointless. While you can choose what to prioritize, many skills feel dumbed down like crowd running and being at higher level doesn't necessarily feel more powerful than a lower one until you get to the endgame skills. Then at the endgame you max your level at 50, but for some reason they didn't balance it so you max your stats at lvl.50, so instead you keep playing and leveling while the number is stuck at 50 and then actually max out around 55-60. There's no real sense to stopping the counter when they could have just made lvl.60 the cap. The old games' ways of growing your character level by level and getting stronger in new ways until you hit the max level and have everything is much preferred.
In the end, it's fun because smashing zombies in the Dead Rising formula is still fun, even more so in co-op. However, DR3 really adds little positive to the franchise and instead removes it's well balanced, tight, memorable map design full of secrets and fun to be explored for dull driving back and forth across 4 mini-maps filled with roadblocks instead. The mission design is bad and the story is very weak (although the protagonist, Nick is kind of endearing in his meekness). Yet despite all that, even a zombie would have to admit dressing up as disco sharkman and rocket punching zombies is good fun for a while.
C+
