3.5/5 ★ – Guitar_Smash's review of Dead Rising 3.

Admittedly, this game has grown on me over the years. I personally think it contains the best fluidity of controls in the series, and the combo potential in the game is insane. The game is enhanced with coop, just like in Dead Rising 2. The amount of zombies on screen at once is insane, and it looks like an absolute nightmare out there. Now, the reasons why the game falls below DR1 and DR2 are as follows: - The zombie threat is basically nonexistent. As you level up in the game, you basically become unkillable. You would have to artificially choose not to upgrade your health to impose some kind of difficulty in this game. - The timer is very generous in this game. The problem with nightmare mode, even though the timer moves quicker, it does not balance the quests accordingly and it just feels like a forced game mode to appease long time fans. - Driving has always been a pain in the ass for this series, and this game is the most prominent example where you have to drive… A LOT, to get around promptly. The map has a shit ton of unnecessary roadblocks, making traversal an absolute nightmare. This has to be the single worst thing about this game. - The color scheme does not work in this game’s favor, which was marketed as a more serious approach for the franchise. When you actually play the game, it is even more out there than Dead Rising 2 at points. The decision to make the game look drab was a bad call and does not match the game’s actual tone, which I would call confused and sporadic at best. Shit just happens so quick in the game’s story without much context or meaning, and it just feels like a mess. - The protagonist Nick is definitely the worst protagonist we have seen in the franchise so far (not counting DR4 “Frank”). He is an insufferable wimp in the cutscenes, but next thing you know in the gameplay, you are nuking crowds of zombies. Mostly everything about the story and it’s characters feels misguided and disingenuous. Overall it is still a fun game to play, but it has its fair share of flaws.