Dead Rising 4

with Dead Rising 4 comes a serious departure from the previous games in tone. The game does not take its self seriously at all and everything is some corny wisecrack joke or attempted one liner. While it's nice to return to Frank West, they've done it such a massive dis-service here

- All of the writing and story is unappealing and poor. They've turned Frank into a corny old professor who constantly cracks 'dad' jokes and the game tries to be ironically funny or something. It seems like a lazy way to not have to write a coherent or decent plot so they instead copped out by trying to make everything a goofy joke. Doesn't work.

- None of the characters are memorable or interesting. Cooker cutter and thrown in. Frank has a female side kick that ends up being more annoying than anything.

- There are three difficulties, but anything above the first one is seemingly meant for New Game Plus. So realistically you can only pick the Normal difficulty, and its way too easy.

- This is a zombie game, and the zombies are not a threat at all. They're barely even a minor annoyance. It's like a couple flies buzzing around, relatively harmless. The only time you notice the zombies is when you're trying to squeeze past an area, and even then they are not a threat to your health, but only they slow your movement. You simply just squeeze past and push them out of the way. Whats the point? The game could have no enemies in it and it would effectively play the same.

- Besides the zombies, the game turns into a mindless generic third person shooter where you go from objective to objective to engage in poorly developed shooting mechanics through waves of braindead AI soldiers. This is actually the highlight of the game, if there is such a thing.

- The aesthetic of the game is rather unappealing. It's set just after Christmas, which means you will constantly be hearing Christmas music or seeing all the decorations. It's just a bizarre design choice, as playing the game under any time besides Christmas just feels out of place. Why do I want to listen to Christmas music and be around festive shit in the middle of July?

- Not to mention the dumb Exosuit. Why is there robotic exosuits in this game? Just because it came out slightly after Fallout 4 so they needed to put it in to appeal to that audience? I don't get it. It wasn't fun to use. Was a boring tedious gimmick.

- Inventory is dumbed down and made less complex. Food is just instant heals instead of the complex and various like the previous games. Ranged and melee have their own slots so the whole game just takes a lot less brainpower to play. Mindnumbing and boring. 

- There is a system where you can combine weapons on the spot by holding a key but unfortunately all of the weapons seem like toys, not actual menacing weapons. Many of them are like superhero shit instead of cool interesting weapons.

- Boring locations to explore everything is empty and lifeless. Soulless. No meaningful side quests or survivors to find. Everything is generic NPC. No unique psychopath bosses, just boring uninteresting side missions. Driving is required to go from places but ultimately meaningless because no threats. 

- To make matters worse all of the melee is literally spam X to win. Every encounter turns into press X to win. Even without upgrading any melee skills. None of the combat is ever a threat, and the game is super easy.

- Because of things like this, none of the missions are memorable or engaging at all. Simply go to the next yellow objective, rinse repeat.

- There is one alteration where you go into 'investigation' modes and you pull out your camera to find highlight areas in the enviorment to take pictures of. It's a 'wheres waldo' game more than anything and is just boring and makes the pacing even more annoying.


-Controls feel like crap and are unresponsive. I used keyboard and mouse and was constantly bumping into walls and failing to turn where I wanted.

Some positives:

+ Easy to get through. game is really short only about 6 hours.
+ Graphics are ok except for some of the aesthetic choices
+ Some of the shooting can be moderately entertaining fighting the soldiers
+ Some boss fights are entertaining
+ Story is entertaining in a stupid cheesy way and because cutscenes are not too plentiful.

4/10