Dead Rising Trilogy: PS4 Review

Dead Rising Trilogy: PS4 Review

Released by Capcom
Platform: PS4

The dead will rise again with this next gen port of the infamous Dead Rising series.

The survival horror series first dropped in August 2006 and centres around freelance photographer Frank West who's dropped into a Colorado mall amid a zombie meltdown. From there, it's survival time for Frank, as well as a time to pull together anyone who's still alive and make it out over a 72 hour period.

The second Dead Rising 2 and Off The Record (all neatly packaged together) are much the same ethos with you being supplanted into the role of Chuck Greene a motorcross rider who's got to face the same undead problems as Frank did - as well as ensuring his daughter gets a constant supply of Zombrex to stop her tipping over to the baddies side. Off the Record puts Frank into the same story and lets you play as the original.

As a trilogy of releases and a port over to the next gen consoles, the Dead Rising Trilogy looks pretty much as it did for the last gen release. Even if the HD elements of the next gen machines mean the games look a lot jerkier than they should do, these are still crispy executed do-overs. But it still looks ever so slightly terrible in its shinier new home and it's good in many ways to see that Capcom's embraced the rougher edges of the series.

Off The Record gains a sandbox mode with challenges but for the large part this is the game you played 10 years ago - zombies stutter and shamble towards death and there's a lot of button mashing to escape their clutches.

All in all, the Dead Rising trilogy feels like a nostalgic curtain raiser to the arrival of Dead Rising 4 in December - it's a welcome blast from the past, but it  perhaps feels a little old hat in this current day and age. Here's hoping the fourth outing has a little more of an edge when it shows up.