How do you differentiate between a remake and a remaster for a video game? It’s a question I still think is left unanswered, especially when different publishers hold different standards for what a remaster or a remake is.
Which brings us to Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster. On paper, this sounds like a faithful remake. It’s completely rebuilt in a new game engine. Gameplay improvements are only quality-of-life changes. Most of the content is left intact. And the game plays like the original 2006. So what gives? Why is this a Deluxe Remaster?
Developer and publisher Capcom has never labelled any of their remakes as remakes. All those new Resident Evil remakes? They’re “reimaginings” as per their official description. The “RE” on the Japanese titles is the closest thing to the company acknowledging those new games as remakes, and that’s chosen more because it cleanly references the English abbreviation of the series, like how Resident Evil 7’s official title in English is Resident Evil VII biohazard.
That explains a bit about Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster. DRDR is a fun abbreviation. And more importantly, Capcom already remastered the game for the 8th-gen consoles (PS4, Xbox One) and PC back in 2016. You already can play Dead Rising on modern consoles and PCs. So why would you want to play Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster, then?
Because one of the most original survival action games ever made deserved to be played by the larger mainstream gaming audience. And this RE Engine glow-up makes it even more enticing to go on a trip to an undead mall and kill some time. And zombies.
Presentation
Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster justifies its existence by having the game remade entirely on Capcom’s RE Engine. And if you follow Capcom games, you know what a powerhouse of a game engine it can be graphically. All of the Resident Evil games since RE7, Devil May Cry V, Street Fighter 6, Dragon’s Dogma II, and the upcoming Monster Hunter Wilds are running on the RE Engine. It’s one of the few in-house tech in the games industry that’s looking to be worth the investment.
And the graphical difference between the original game designed for 7th generation consoles and the Deluxe Remaster running on a 9th-gen console is staggering. Frank West and the other humans you meet look more alive than ever with their new realistic faces. They even have different heights! The many start-and-stop cutscenes you see now hits harder as a result of the more detailed faces. Though seeing hair clipping into the neck and shoulders detracts those scenes a bit. Still, the opening scene of the game is quite the gut-wrencher with these photorealistic models.
Some of the textures are questionable. There’s a door in the security camera room where the label is all gibberish letters for some reason. The mall can’t make up their mind if the food court stall is called “Chris’s” or “Chris'” (no “s” after the apostrophe). And on the PS5, the texture quality itself can be a bit grainy and pixely on smaller objects.
The mall itself looks great. The customer-facing facade of the strip mall looks lively and appropriately tacky. The big signs, the rows of shops, the quaint decorative fountain. An indoor roller coaster with a children’s play park. It sells that Americana strip mall feel. Meanwhile, the backrooms are all grungy and disturbing-looking. There is a day-night cycle. So the mall isn’t fully lit up when it’s closing time, giving the place an even more eerie feel when it’s all dark and you mostly see red glows from a zombie’s eye.
There are no graphics settings on the PS5, the game just runs at what my eyes perceive as 60 FPS. And the performance is rock solid, which is fantastic. There is, however, an aggressive use of culling to help it reach that target framerate. You can see objects pop in and pop out at the edge of the screen during the helicopter sequence. And is it me, or is the zombie crowd not as dense? I remember way back then where the crowd size was the most impressive part of this series. Maybe it’s the horde of not-zombies of Days Gone and World War Z that have raised the bar of zombie hordes. Or maybe this Deluxe Remaster did do some tricks on zombie density to get the game running at this high frame rate.
The presentation changes are mostly skin-deep, and that’s intentional. Frank still controls rather janky, as he should. His jumps, kicks, and attacks still have the right kind of stiffness as the 2006 original would have. This may look like a brand new Dead Rising game, but it still plays like the old Dead Rising game. I appreciate the developers had drawn a hard line between what should be improved on and what should remain untouched for the sanctity of the game.
The other part of Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster that did get a touch-up is the voice acting. The voice talents have mostly been recast, but most of the lines you remember are still there. Frank still goes, “I cover wars, you know.” But more dialogue has been added, like when talking to survivors. Thankfully, you can still mash through the dialogue, only reading the subtitles, like the original. But it’s nice that everyone has a voice, even if the survivors basically share a pool of a handful of voice actors saying generic enough stuff so they can be reused.
The game begins with the option to turn off licensed music, which is good news for Dead Rising fans. All the licensed music from the original is intact. Now a new generation of players will be traumatised when walking in a park at night only to hear the ominous guitar riffs that open Gone Guru by Lifeseeker. The soundtrack selection really dates this game in a good way. What game released in 2024 would have had Nu-Metal and Rap Rock for its soundtrack? A game that is based on a release from 2006, that’s what. What was supposed to be the current trend is now a preservation of times gone by, and I appreciate the efforts the team went to get these artists on board for another licensing deal.
Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster lives up to its name, and then some. Even if Capcom is hesitant about calling this a faithful remake, the scope of the project and the efforts put by the development team are, in my opinion, what a faithful remake supposed to be. This fresh coat of paint isn’t erasing away the history of the original (except some specific ones, more on that later), which I found to be remarkable.
Gameplay
In Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster, you play as freelance photojournalist Frank West. Frank found a scoop in a random (fictional) town of Willamette, Colorado, and decided to drop into the town’s only landmark, the Willamette Parkview Mall, via a helicopter ride. The town’s been quarantined, the army is here, something is fishy, and Frank is here with a camera to get his scoop. He only has 72 hours before the helicopter arrives back. Oh, and zombies have entered the mall.
Dead Rising is truly ahead of its time as it uses one of the most brilliant but also not as well received mechanics—everything operates on a time schedule. Mirroring Frank’s profession as a journalist, your main enemy is deadlines. The main missions, cases, only trigger if you are at the right place and at the right time, and if you miss it, that’s it. You failed the mission. But it’s not game over. You still have to survive for 72 (in-game) hours. There are other points of interest around the mall you can head to, some of which are only available within a strict time window. If you think time management in the Persona series was already stressful, now imagine time ticking in real time. No time for analysis paralysis; gotta hustle. Or bring out the map where time is paused and plan your itinerary from there.
I’ll be frank, not everyone will love the time mechanic—some will argue it’s the worst aspect of the series, to which I respectfully disagree but also understand why. Because of the time limits, you can never do everything in the first playthrough. And that’s the point—you can’t. It’s by design. If this is your first time playing Dead Rising, you are expected to fail and miss some of these encounters and missions. And that’s fine; that’s your first playthrough. In Deluxe Remaster, it explicitly tells you what playthrough number you are on on this save file. And in the pause menu, you get to see how many experience points you gain for this run. The game expects you to replay Dead Rising over and over. It is run-based.
Over the course of your playthrough, Frank gains experience with Prestige Points (PP). He can level up by killing zombies and taking sick pictures with his camera. And you can begin a new playthrough and carry over Frank’s current level and inventory. So you can begin the next playthrough with more health, item slots, new moves, and more ways to survive through the 72-hour hell.
And if you wonder if Dead Rising would be any good if they removed the time mechanics, look at Dead Rising 4. Capcom’s sole remaining Western development team closed down after poor sales from that title as it sanded down its rough mechanics to become a bog-standard open-world game.
Really, I implore you to give the time mechanics a chance. It’s stressful, but think of it like this. Dead Rising is like Hitman, and in some ways like Deathloop. You don’t know what you’re doing the first time around. You might miss opportunities here and there. But over time, you’ll accrue game knowledge. You’ll learn where the shortcuts are. You’ll know what the best weapons are and where you can find them consistently. You can figure out the optimal time schedule to attempt a do-everything run.
This is a “knowledge is power” game, just like the recent crop of games such as Tunic and Animal Well, where your reward for putting in the time and experiencing failure is discovering all the tricks you thought were impossible when you first began playing.
That’s the magic of Dead Rising: discovering new ways to play as you die and die and fail again. I hope more gamers get to discover this game. 2006 was not the time for time schedules, as players crave the openness of a true open world. Nowadays, when those experiences are the norm, maybe Dead Rising can rise again from the dead following this Deluxe Remaster.
The game not being open world also adds to its strengths. For some reason, most items spawn back at the same place every time you load into the same zone. It’s odd that even the zombie horde resets if you load into the zone, load out, and load back in.
But consider the “knowledge is power” angle; the game wants you to learn this and take advantage of it. The elevator that leads to the safehouse will always be filled with zombies, but if you press the elevator button quick enough, you can safely load into the next screen without needing to deal with them. If you ever get low on health, you are guaranteed to find bottles of wine in the food court or the infinite supply of orange juice upstairs at the Pleasure Plaza. Some locations do change over time due to events triggering—Jill’s Sandwich (heh) stops leaving food items in the store after Day 2, for example.
It may be very video-gamey, but learning the game as a set of rules that you can take advantage of can be fun. The game has a speedrunning community, who are people passionate about beating the game as fast as they can and do so by exploiting these little tricks.
But the game having autosaves does mean it loses one particular tension point, which is the agony of having to find a save point. In the original game, you only get to save at a restroom. And they are far and few between. Make a wrong turn where you stumbled into a boss fight, and that could mean you forfeit that run if you forgot to save at all since you started this playthrough. But making that trip to the toilet will cost you time and might be dangerous if you’re not careful.
But not anymore in DRDR. The game conveniently makes an auto-save before an encounter or just after you enter a new zone. And maybe too convenient. I easily got Ending A, the best ending, in just one playthrough without ever manual saving. You could save so much time not worrying about finding a save point. It needs a semi-ironman mode where autosaves are disabled for the purists out there. But hey, can’t argue that this quality of life change is making people actually beat the game.
While you’re in the mall to search for the truth to the mystery of the zombies, you also will find survivors in need of rescuing. Some of these folks will need some convincing before they join up—smack them with a frying pan if you have to.
And once recruited, they’ll follow you around until you bring them to the safehouse. Some of these survivors are more than happy to fight back if you arm them with weaponry. Some have mobility issues, so you need to lend them a shoulder or a piggyback ride to escort them to safety. Some, like most (but not all) of the women, can’t fight back, but you can… hold their hands. One girl per hand even.
Escorting these survivors to safety isn’t a nightmare of one escort mission after another. But it can be if you’re not careful. I once had to bring home four ladies after saving them from a terrible fate and thought going through the park was a good idea.. until Gone Guru starts playing. Which was wild and unexpected because I swear I dealt with those joyriding convicts last night.
(This was a bug in the original, which they kept in the previous remaster and now in Deluxe Remaster. It’s now a feature.)
Trying to outrun the Humvee was a futile effort, so I reloaded the save and go the long way and across the open-air plaza (with those densely packed zombie crowd) instead. They all managed to more or less survive. One lady was so mad that her health was low from getting repeatedly mauled by the zoms that she shoved me and continuously hit other people while in the safehouse. But they all survived. The developers made some changes to the survivors’ AI, and their pathfinding is good enough. And the fact that you can ask them to go to a specific position is nice, which allows them to just stay put while you take care of some business, like handling a psychopath.
Speaking of, let’s talk about the psychopaths. These boss fights are still tough, and paired with the combat system as it is, it makes me question if, during the development of the original game, these bosses were designed by another team oblivious to how the game’s core movement and combat worked. It’s janky as all heck. Trying to land a hit is tough. Getting hit by these lunatics ranging from a sadistic police officer to a chainsaw-juggling clown will send you flying and possibly into a combo of pain. Jumping and platforming are also hit-and-miss experiences. Thankfully, the new dodge roll makes these encounters a little more tolerable.
You have to play it like a soulslike fight in that playing lame by dodging hits and only doing safe attacks is key to these boss battles. There’s no lock-on, so pray that you can land your hits well enough. And guns are terrible. Frank and other humans can take a number of shotgun shots to the face. There’s no one-hit kills, understandable given that would be brutal for a game that was designed around not having autosaves originally. But man, ranged weaponry is absolutely lousy. It could be worse, like shopping carts having tank controls (which is fine) and being really, really slow (which is not fine).
If the combat is janky and the time-management aspect has mixed reception, what makes Dead Rising all that special then? That has to be its charm. The game itself is all serious (more on the story later), but exploring the mall, you can’t help but see how silly the gameplay can be. You can use just about anything as a weapon, but not all of them are effective. Go to the toy store and grab a toy laser sword, and it’s as good as you’d think a toy sword is during a zombie outbreak, barely. But it is fun to just lob CDs in their jewel cases, thinking they can do damage like a shuriken would (it barely does anything to the zombies), or throw expensive gems from the jewellery store to hopefully trip up some zombies. Frank also gets to dress up at the many clothing stores. And he has no problems crossdressing or wearing children-sized clothing or a Mega Man helmet. And the fact the way he dresses up appears in the cutscenes is great; the super-serious story becomes campy with Frank’s bold and zany fashion sense on display.
Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster’s gameplay is the same as the original. The janky combat, fun exploration, and dread-inducing time mechanics may not be for everyone, but these elements do combine well for an action game with zombies and horror themes. The charming silliness that is the byproduct of the odd mishmash of elements also holds up.
Content
Dead Rising isn’t meant to be consumed in one whole go. The time mechanic will likely make you miss out on some optional missions or even miss out on the main mission if you’re not careful. But that’s all fine. There are multiple endings to get through the 72 Hour mode, which roughly translates to 6 real hours per playthrough. Getting the A ending will unlock Overtime Mode, which expands the story to one more day and is ridiculously difficult. And after that is completed, you get Infinity mode, which, contrary to its name, isn’t infinite. It’s more of a survival mode where you have to fight through the zombie horde to try and survive the longest all while health ticks down over time and the specific areas where food items are abound are locked. You could play this infinitely if you’re good enough.
It makes sense for a game where the story makes a sharp criticism towards American consumerism that is not only lean in content but also makes you put in the effort to see everything the game has to offer. This is no buffet.
Speaking of the story, for all the reputation the game has for being a goofy, zany zombie game (which the recent marketing has also leaned into), the story’s actually grim and serious. It’s told with sincerity in that it presents the events as horrifying, gruesome, and scary. That intro bit was painful to see unfold. The cutscenes have a sense of thrilling drama as Frank gleams a bit more of what the mystery is. The psychopaths may be silly without context, but their intro cutscenes show how unhinged they are and how scary that is that they treat life like nothing. Even if their death cutscenes have a bit of dark comedy. And I actually appreciate it. The game wasn’t built to be “haha funny,” it just happens to be received as such despite genuinely trying to be a horror game. Dead Rising is a campy horror game, not just a silly zombie game, and that’s not being said enough, I feel.
There are some changes to the content with the Deluxe Remaster, which some have considered censorship. Frank doesn’t get points for taking pictures with Erotica elements, so no, you are not rewarded for being a pervert anymore. But that meant that one side mission where you were supposed to take an Erotica picutre to highlight the unhingedness of this one person you meet feels a bit weird. Why is he all creepy when asking you to take a funny picture instead? But there is one request by a survivor where you still have to take pictures of her doing sexy poses—those pictures now have a Drama tag instead.
The other changes in content I found seem minor. Replacing the word “genocide” in the list of challenges makes sense considering the current state of the world we live in. I personally don’t mind the changes, but for those familiar with the original game, the way these are changed definitely made it feel like a botched replacement job where you can see the outlines of the terrible change they’ve made. Though for the rest of us, it’s fine.
How much you can get out of Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster depends on how you value your content. The game is designed to be replayed over and over with relatively short playthroughs. But if you’re good enough, there is an option to play this forever. It has a lot of things to discover. I can’t figure out where to find the maintenance key for those shortcuts in my first playthrough. And that’s good enough motivation for me to do a new run.
Personal Enjoyment
Dead Rising as a series had a long history of being on Xbox, so I missed the boat on most of these games. I did try a bit of Dead Rising 2, though I never finished it. So I am slightly familiar with the series’ gameplay loop.
And that gameplay loop, I argue, is the soul of Dead Rising. One person against a horde of dumb zombies, in an area filled with household items to be improvised as weapons, but you’re on the clock. This concept may not have been accepted in the mainstream, which relegated the series to just being a cult hit, but it’s such a brilliant gameplay hook against the sea of bloated open world games available today.
I support games being accessible and easy to get into for the masses. But the latter, the “easy to get into” bit, tends to make game design become bland and generic in favour of catering to a wider demographic. Dead Rising said hell no to that and makes you play by their rules. And I love the boldness of it all.
What really makes Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster resonated with me is not just the bold mechanics. But also its setting: a shopping mall. Look, I grew up where a trip to a shopping mall in the middle of a city was the highlight of the month. And I do enjoy the occasional mall crawling these days as well. Exploring a cosy, welcoming urban area where everyone is trying to sell you on something is comforting for me. The Willamette Parkview Mall isn’t as big as a MidValley Megamall or a 1 Utama, not even a Pavillion Bukit Bintang (really, Kuala Lumpur has ridiculously huge malls for some reason, it’s not like everyone can even afford to shop there, not in this economy). But it’s just as fun to do window shopping, the crowd of zombies and the impending deadlines be damned.
The Deluxe Remaster did just enough to make the original Dead Rising more appealing to new players. I probably still hesitate to buy and play the previously available remaster. But now that it looks all nice like this, I’m sold. And I enjoyed the hell out of my playthroughs I’ve had.
Verdict
Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster’s improvements may be skin deep, but that’s just enough to elevate this cult hit run-based action game to be a fresh new game in 2024. And that’s saying something about the original 2006 game and the state of the games industry.
The fun novelty of exploring a dead mall filled with the undead while dreading the passage of time as you face against multiple deadlines is such a rare experience that any gamer should experience at least once. And if you skipped over the series previously, this is the best entry point to start.
Hopefully this will bring the Dead Rising back from the dead with a few more of these Deluxe Remasters. Janky, odd games with bold ideas deserve a place in this world. Even if it’s not for everyone, it’s for someone. And maybe that someone is you.
Played on the PS5. Review code provided by the publisher.
Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster
Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster's improvements may be skin deep, but that's just enough to elevate this cult hit run-based action game to be a fresh new game in 2024
- Presentation 9
- Gameplay 8.5
- Content 8
- Personal Enjoyment 9