Dead Rising 4 PC, Xbox One
Frank West heads back to Willamette to snap necks and selfies
Pity Frank West. Having temporarily saved Colorado 16 years ago, he finds himself back in Willamette during a Black Friday rush on the mall. It must have taken a lot of courage to go back to the scene of such a traumatic experience, so you can imagine how he must feel when a second, much bigger zombie outbreak coincides with his return.
The passing of time hasn’t left West in peak condition, either, and the experienced photojournalist is now 54 and a little more world-weary. Much like, we imagine, the players who’ve stuck with the notoriously awkward series since its inception. Dead
Rising 4 is well aware of its predecessor’s idiosyncrasies, however, and goes out of its way to address as many of them as possible. The inventory system, for example, has been streamlined: now there are three separate weapon wheels (one for melee tools, one for projectiles and one for firearms), and quick switching is available in any of them to make mid-crowd changes in tactics easier. There’s even a separate inventory for food, none of which needs to be prepared this time around – you just tap the relevant D-pad direction whenever you want pepping up.
The comboing system has undergone an overhaul, too, and now you don’t have to seek out a workbench to assemble any of the game’s vast number of ridiculous weapons or vehicles – combining items requires a simple button press on the fly. Survivors, who are no longer found at predetermined locations but spawn in different places each time you play, now drop loot and offer useful tips. The more you collect in your safehouse, the better rewards you can expect each time you return. But perhaps the biggest change is the removal of the game’s polarising global timer.
“We did a ton of user research on it – focus groups and things like that,” Capcom Vancouver studio director Joe Nickolls tells us. “You’re going to piss someone off whatever you do, right? But the majority of people didn’t really love the timer – they wanted to explore. Of course, some people want to get into the game and just plough through and do the mission, but most people get into the game, intend to go and do the
mission but end up dicking around for a long time, just having fun, killing zombies and finding things, and then do the next mission.”
Anyone disappointed by the absence of this additional layer of pressure should feel reassured by the fact that a timer remains for the game’s fourplayer co-op mode, which will see players tackle missions that are separate from the main campaign. The studio also plans to release a DLC episode called Frank Rising which, in a nod to the first game, will see an infected West battling to find a cure before he runs out of time.
DR4 runs on an improved version of the Forge Engine used for DR3, but the studio has squeezed a lot more out of the ageing tech.
DR4 throws thousands of zombies on screen at once in spectacular crowds, which clog streets as far as you’re able to see (an effect the team calls a “meat river”). But in addition to sheer numbers, DR4 introduces a couple of terrifying new zombie variants. At the bottom of the tree are the Horde, gormless wandering cattle that are only really dangerous if you drop your guard. The Freshly Infected, meanwhile, take their cue from the sprinting horrors in 28 Days Later and share animation sets with West – they can clamber up onto cars and crates that might once have kept you safe and pull you down into the crowd. But Evos present the biggest undead threat: they work in packs, aim to manipulate situations, will hang back while the Horde wears you down, and are capable of leaping 30 feet through the air.
“They kind of work like the Raptors in Jurassic Park,” Nickolls explains. “They click, they talk to each other – they’re organised.”
You can even the odds by throwing on one of the new military exosuits (see ‘Suit up’), but it’s clear that, irrespective of how powerful your Christmas-themed homemade weapon is, you’re going to have to approach situations a little more tactically than in the past.
Nickolls: “I want people to start thinking, ‘I’m in a zombie apocalypse and I need to get some food – I should probably go to the grocery store or the food fair. If I need clothes, I should probably go to the laundromat’ – that’s where you’ll find a lot of the stupid things to wear. We’ve tried to make it more strategic. If we keep making the same Dead
Rising over and over, some players are going to get what they want, but people want to see growth and see us adapting as we go. And now you can combo Christmas trees and snowman heads, and there are people dressed up as elves who’re coming after you and you’re beating them to death with a giant candy cane.”
“Most people intend to go and do the mission but end up dicking around”