Dead Rising is still one of the best zombie games ever made and is one of our favorite games overall. The setting was perfect. The story was solid. The gameplay was amazingly fun. Capcom really nailed it. Then they tried to make sequels that weren't quite the same. Click to read more of our thoughts on the franchise as a whole and watch Dead Rising 1 gameplay.
I want to preface this by saying that I actually like all of the Dead Rising games. I'm not one of those people that think 3 and, especially, 4 stink out loud. They're fine. Honestly, I don't really understand why some people hate 4 so much. Well, I know at least partly why - Dead Rising 3 was an Xbox exclusive and Dead Rising 4 was exclusive for a year, and some people really hold a grudge about that sort of thing. Of course, it's OK if Sony does it, but a bad thing when Microsoft does it. Losers.
Like I said, though, I've enjoyed all of the Dead Rising games. I do still think 1 is the best - by a wide margin - but I've played and liked them all. I'd probably rank them like this - 1>2:OTR>3>4>2. I also played the Wii version of Dead Rising 1, but it sucked and had bad controls and far less zombies onscreen, so screw that one.
About 4 specifically, people are really weird about that one. People complained that it didn't have a timer anymore, but just as many people complained about having a time limit in the other games. People complained that Frank looked different and had a different voice. The core zombie killing gameplay was just as fun as ever, though, and probably actually better than ever since you could craft weapons on the fly and didn't need a special bench. Killing zombies was incredibly fun in Dead Rising 4, but people performed all sorts of mental gymnastics to make excuses for not liking it (even though we all really know it was because it was only on Xbox for a year ...). I liked it just fine.
About 2, though. They screwed up the balance on Dead Rising 2. The bosses were generally not very fun to fight and far too difficult. Having to constantly give a little girl Zombrex was a pain in the butt as well. They fixed these flaws in the non-canon Off the Record version, which I greatly prefer. Off the Record also had a sandbox mode available from the start so you could just jump in and have fun.
Dead Rising 1 is still the champ overall. The mall setting was amazing, the gameplay was fun and fresh and new, and the back stories of the psychopaths you fought against were deeply rooted in horror lore and really added a lot to the experience. Dead Rising 1 was still a horror game - albeit light hearted at parts - but it still had horror at its core. The rest of the franchise dumped the classic horror just to have more extreme bosses and weird stuff, which doesn't work for me.
This video was fun to record. I just kind of derped around and didn't bother doing any objectives. I did go kill some psychopaths along the way and showed the easy way to do a lot of it - the convicts aren't nearly as difficult as people pretend they are. It was a good time.
