A hero returns in Dead Rising 4 Its the holiday season in Willamette, Colorado and a mysterious outbreak has overrun the Willamette Memorial Megaplex Mall and surrounding town with dangerous and deadly predators. Join Frank West as you explore a vast, open world sandbox filled with dangerous new zombies and a million ways.

A brainless, buggy open-world game that's forgotten the second you put down the pad.

It's never a good idea to start with a food metaphor, but - if the first Dead Rising was an acquired taste, Dead Rising 4 is popcorn. That's to say, it's pretty low on flavour or nutritional content, but if you shovel gigantic handfuls into your mouth without cease you can just about maintain the illusion that you're eating something substantial. By turns demented and uninspired, Capcom Vancouver's latest shopping-turned-killing-spree feels like a series marking time till the executioner arrives, but there's a lot to chew over here and it can be oddly, even annoyingly hard to stop.

Abundance has always been Dead Rising's keyword, of course. The 2006 original cast players as Frank West, a tabloid photographer scoping out a zombie-infested mall in Willamette, Colorado - a mall that proved a testing ground for the weaponisable potential of common household commodities, as players sallied into battle armed not just with guns and blades but parosols, TV sets, bowling balls and fruit. There were a few notable checks and rough edges, however: a strict six-hour campaign running time, fussy controls and a cast of goofy locals on journeys of their own through the game, characters destined to meet a sticky end out of shot unless waylaid and escorted to the mall's saferoom. The campaign and character death mechanics, in particular, split audiences down the middle - some hailing this approach as a source of suspense that adds to the impression of a living world, others decrying it as an arbitrary hindrance that forces you to play and replay if you want to chase up every lead.

Fast forward 10 years and Frank is back - hot on the trail of his wayward apprentice Vick in the midst of yet another, unexplained zombie outbreak. The mall is back, too, though it has evolved almost beyond recognition - new sights and sounds include a mini-car racetrack, a gingerbread Santa's village and a Caribbean-themed section where thousands of corpses squelch in the shadow of a life-sized pirate galleon. There is still an absolute ton of gaudy crap with which to abuse the undead (the game takes place in the aftermath of a particularly bloodthirsty Black Friday sale), and the zombies themselves are, as ever, not so much a threat as an army of crash test dummies, begging to be crowned with a Christmas wreath, lit on fire and kicked off an escalator.

If Dead Rising 4 is still a work of knowing excess - George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead through the lens of Grand Theft Auto - it has lost much of the original's rigour. The timer, already dialled back significantly in previous games, is gone completely - for much of the campaign you're free to procrastinate as you please, waving aside the pleas and demands of radio contacts as you stroll around shop floors looking for a new jacket or sneakers that compliment the armour you've just lifted from a medieval props store. It's a change for the better if you like to clear out an open world in a single playthrough, but the trade-off is that actions feel less consequential. There's no longer the slightest incentive to plan, to attend to and intercept the side stories tunnelling through the landscape. Mind you, there are no longer many side stories to discover.

In place of campaign co-op, Dead Rising 4 offers a separate four-player component with randomly selected missions that takes place exclusively in the Willamette mall, where you start over from level zero as one of the bit parts from the story - retreating to a saferoom to heal up and replenish supplies every few missions. There's a lot of crossover in terms of level-up abilities and combo recipes, and the layout and assets are the same, but the shuffling of missions keeps things reasonably fresh. It can get quite hectic - many of the missions involve timers and reviving a friend in the midst of a baying mob is as difficult as it sounds. I'm disappointed not to be able to play through the campaign itself with a partner, but this is a serviceable substitute.

In place of the old, expansive but exacting Dead Rising template, the new game offers up a fat nosebag of unlockable side content in the Assassin's Creed mold, with safehouses per region that must be purged of zombies to unlock recurring missions in the vicinity. Carry out enough side missions and you'll level up the nearest safehouse, which basically boils down to there being more things to buy from shopkeepers. As in Dead Rising 3, the presence of people who sell you things in a game ostensibly devoted to the unholy joys of looting suggests that something is a little rotten at the core.

It's a placid, tiresome way of pegging down a world, though it might have scraped a pass if the missions in question were memorable. There are a paltry three types of sidequest - helping stranded refugees fend off the horde, rescuing people from Obscuris, the inevitable dastardly G-man group you'll spend most of the story pursuing, and blowing up bits of Obscuris equipment. Either way, the idea is generally to clear a 20-metre-wide space of anything undead and/or unfriendly. Other secondary attractions include the Maniacs, watered-down versions of the optional Psycho bosses from previous games that are basically slightly tougher humans wearing sillier costumes. They're introduced with minimal fanfare and are just as unceremoniously dispatched.

You can expect a few new varieties of zombies, at least - 'freshies' who are still limber enough to jump around, and 'evos' who are both tough, slippery foes and able to summon the horde. Any additional enjoyment you might glean from tussling with them has to be set against the experience of battling Obscuris soldiers - the human AI is a fabulous mixture of dumb as a post and aggravatingly accurate. And then there are the main bosses. Dead Rising has never put up much of a bossfight, but those you'll meet in this game are a sorry bunch indeed, governed by crude pattern behaviours such as spawning minions when they take enough damage, or coughing up the odd, half-hearted unblockable attack that you'll rarely trouble to dodge because healing items are so abundant. It's a real waste given that Frank himself is a much more capable combatant this time, with separate, easily switched inventories for healing items, ranged weapons and melee weapons, mapped to the D-pad.

Which brings us to weapon (and vehicle) crafting - trimmed down still further from Dead Rising 3, with Frank now able to bolt together a new toy using whatever lies at his feet. There are some amusingly idiotic specimens to uncover - I particularly rate the Back Cracker, a musket-toting rucksack puppet that blasts away at zombies to the rear while you thwack those in front with a trashcan lid. It's a fine way of navigating a packed alley, though you're better off in an exosuit. Tucked away in crates throughout the world and available to you during certain story missions, these Iron Man knock-offs bestow ample hitting power, get their own category of weapons - including a set of gauntlets that generate a blizzard - and can be upgraded on the fly using certain items. Most of them have a very short operational life, however, which creates a gentle pressure to plan out a rampage before cracking the seal.

If casting Robot Ice Magic at the unruly dead is a tonic, many of the more fanciful weapons will be familiar to players of DR2 and DR3 - the ever-reliable baseball bats dipped in nails and sawblades, the novelty mascot heads equipped with a trunkful of napalm - and not all are as inventive as they appear. For every magic wand that transforms the target into a gingerbread man, or boxful of exploding clockwork cats, there's a gun that is essentially a grenade launcher dipped in lumpy glitter.

Finding a blueprint may be as fun as making use of it. In fact, some of the greatest moments in Dead Rising 4 full stop come when scouring a neighbourhood for a recipe or some other trinket, thinning out the horde absent-mindedly as you plod through rec rooms and attics, car showrooms and J-pop outlets (Capcom in-jokes are, as you'd expect, thick on the ground). Many combo blueprints are housed in sealed panic rooms, uncovered using your camera's spectrometer - in a smart touch, there's the opportunity to visit the home security business in question at the mall before you enter the town itself, so you'll already know which clues to watch out for - and delving around for those panic rooms means attending to some nicely evocative interiors. This is hardly one of those games where every domestic detail screams a tale of shattering poignancy, but each house does feel like the property of a distinct personality, now fled or eaten or left to rot in a bathtub. Timber and stone builders fredericksburg.

The corpse of the original Dead Rising is definitely in here somewhere, kicking if not alive. Much as I've moaned about the generic open world elements, the shonky enemy line-up and the shortage of 'wow' moments, few games have quite such panache when it comes to steaming through a crowd, acid-belching mace in hand. At its best, Dead Rising 4's glitzy satirical trappings and capacity for bloody buffoonery come together to create a rare kind of festive treat. But it's not long before a sense of exhausting over-familiarity kicks in. You can while away an evening chugging popcorn, but you couldn't get through an apocalypse on the stuff.

When it released late last year, Dead Rising 4 was one of the best titles of 2016 that PlayStation owners couldn’t play. Fast forward one year, and now Sony gamers have access to the definitive version of the game called Dead Rising 4: Frank’s Big Package. This isn’t just a normal game of the year edition, though, as it also comes with gameplay tweaks and new content.

From a gameplay perspective, Dead Rising 4 continues right where Xbox One launch title Dead Rising 3 left off. As such, the game is more of a straightforward action title, rather than a strange grind with an imposed time limit. This changes the structure wildly, but it winds up being a net positive for someone like me who doesn’t want to continually play through the same segments. At its core, though, this is still Dead Rising, and there’s all of the ridiculous zombie killing and weapon crafting that one would expect from such a game.

This change also allows the game to be more cinematic in nature, and some of the writing in Dead Rising 4 is downright hilarious. The opening sees Frank West operating under the genius alias of Hank East until he gets swooped into yet another zombie-filled government conspiracy. Shortly thereafter, players are given the ability to freely roam around a gigantic map filled with ridiculous locations to kill zombies in.

A Girl Like You Needs Something Real

One nice thing about Frank’s Big Package is that it brings several positive changes to the core gameplay (which was already plenty of fun). One particular area of improvement is seen in the artificial intelligence of human enemies. Ideally, these foes should offer up more of a challenge than a braindead zombie, and that finally is the case now. Fighting Maniacs are now a much more challenging affair, and they wind up being a real highlight of the experience. Additionally, new side missions called Distress Calls have been added that have Frank rescuing survivors and then leading them to safety while getting away from a group of zombies. These help break up the general mayhem, and players get a cool reward for finishing these optional missions.

Ultimately, the main game of Dead Rising 4 winds up being a real blast. It’s one that tells an interesting story, while also never taking itself too seriously. It’s a real balancing act, but one that Capcom ultimately nailed. It might not be the Dead Rising that players knew originally (although the harder difficulties replicate that better), but it certainly will leave the player having a blast by the time the credits roll.

Once the story is over, the real fun starts in Dead Rising 4. The PlayStation 4 release is filled with so much content besides the regular post-game, and there’s everything from multiplayer to single-player DLC to get through. Unlike Dead Rising 2, which I loved the multiplayer in, I didn’t really fall head over heels for it here. Rather than allowing players to just cooperatively go through the story (which wouldn’t really work that well here due to the more cinematic nature), this mode has players playing as random survivors competing to see who can get the most kills. It’s totally fine, if only because the core combat is so satisfying, but it all feels like busy work.

Wanna Get You Something From The Heart

Since I never bought the DLC for Dead Rising 4, the first thing I did in Frank’s Big Package was play the Frank Rising DLC. It’s an epilogue that winds up giving Frank some very different skills from the base game. It also harkens back to Dead Rising‘s roots by introducing a two-hour time limit into the mix, so it winds up being a mix of old and new. Overall, it’s a decent addition (although one that feels a bit unnecessary as the regular ending fit better).

The best add-on, and what that is new to this updated release, is the Capcom Heroes mode. This is a new way to play through the story that changes the combat completely by having Frank West transform into various Capcom characters, and it has more in common with a Dynasty Warriors title than Dead Rising. Each character – even Frank West – has a set of standard attacks that are accessed by mashing the melee attack button, and then a set of powerful special abilities. This basically turns the game to an easy mode (at least on normal difficulty), but the action gets so ridiculous and fun to watch that it evens out.

Oh, and I guess I should mention that there’s the Super Ultra Dead Rising 4 Mini Golf DLC as well. This has players playing mini golf while wearing powerful suits of armor from the story mode. It’s a really dumb idea (which I mean fully as a compliment), but the golfing never feels solid enough for it to really have much value from a few rounds of entertainment. You’re ultimately playing the poor man’s Hot Shots Golf, and who has time for that?

Dead Rising 4 was already a highly enjoyable game when it released last year, but Frank’s Big Package really takes it to the next level. While not all of the DLC is a home run, the tweaks to the main game are all a net positive. The new Capcom Heroes mode is also a blast, and basically turns Dead Rising into a crossover musou title. Frank’s Big Package may look completely ridiculous, but it’ll leave you pleased in all of the right ways.

Dead Rising 4 PS4 review code provided by publisher. Version 1.01 reviewed on PlayStation 4 Pro. For more information on scoring, please read our Review Policy.