Recent reviews by JackRabbit™

So this is my comprehensive review of Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster after a little over 13-14 hours of gameplay and all achievements unlocked aside from the 5 and 7 day survivor achievements which I am working on now. I will likely talk about the story a little bit so expect spoilers. Not sure why I should care about spoilers as the story itself is going on 20 years old, but I might as well put it out there to avoid some complaining.

- Graphics
So the game has been updated with the RE engine and has been given a serious touch up in the graphics department. The changes are VERY noticeable in the mall itself and especially in Leisure Park. Foliage as far as the eye can see in the park, and lots of smaller details added into the whole mall to really bring the Willamette Parkview Mall to life. I think it is a very impressive update to the original's already good looking setting. My one complaints would be with 2 things: the gore and the character's face models. Now let me say that the gore looks absolutely amazing. Blood looks super real and it is an absolute mess after slaughter. My complaint is that blood doesn't really get onto Frank at all. You'd think after taking a battle axe I found in an antique shop to 50 zombies or so, that I'd get some blood on me. Nope, my outfit is just as clean as it was before I even jumped out of the helicopter. Blood on your character is something that literally EVERY other entry in the series had, including the atrocity that was Dead Rising 4. Maybe this is something that can be added in a future update (assuming they do anything else with this game). As for the character face models, it's very much a mixed bag. There's a lot of detail added into all of the faces that make them look more real, but they still seem...ugly compared to the admittedly already ugly-looking faces the original Dead Rising had. It's hard to explain. To me, Frank especially looks much older than he was in the original. Whether this was intentional or not, I don't know. But it just doesn't click with me very well. Not the biggest deal though, and it doesn't take away from all of the graphical fidelity added to the rest of the game.

- Gameplay
Gameplay, for the most part, is still just as solid as in the original. Zombies are still super fun to take...whatever you can find to. That's the beauty of Dead Rising, if you can pick it up, you can use it as a weapon, and that very much still holds true to this game. There have even been some improvements to gameplay, like the option to fast forward time at safe places to get rid of some of the downtime people would run into with the original. It's not required by any means, and if people still prefer waiting out the time doing...whatever, they can just avoid the option. There have been a few tweaks to difficulty overall with a few aspects, but I will touch on those more later in the review.

- Audio
Audio is probably the thing that was altered the least out of everything from the original game. All of the original music from the OST of Dead Rising to the added in tracks for Pyschopath fights are still present in this version of the game. The developers even added a streamer mode so that streamers and content creators can safely play through the game without worry about copyright strikes. Very welcome change! Now personally, the original Dead Rising tracks were never really my favorite in gaming. However, that is definitely a personal preference. The soundtrack is still very well done!

- Difficulty
So based on what I've seen from other reviewers, this section has been a pretty controversial set of changes from the original. The game has definitely seen some changes, mostly QoL that make the game significantly more accessible for players. Now, a lot of people say that the original game was "so much harder" than this version. I'm going to have to respectfully disagree. The original Dead Rising definitely had a lot more outdated game mechanics to it that made the game more...frustrating to play in my opinion.

The survivor AI is a particular stand out one to me. In the original game, survivor NPC AI would CONSTANTLY get stuck on objects, zombies, and each other. Often times, this would lead to you having to babysit them incredibly close and kill every zombie in the immediate area or you risk them getting swarmed super easily and promptly killed. This would cost you valuable PP (the XP for this game) and the Saint achievement if you were going for that. The survivor AI in the remaster has seen a serious improvement. They are not by any means easy mode though. In my first playthrough, I had a couple of occasions where they would run into each other and make a lot of noise, or would get hit by one zombie and go into, what I can only describe as a rage, and start attacking every zombie around them and you would have to kill the zombies yourself to stop this rage. This is reminiscent to what they would do in the original game, however to a much lesser extent. Now, while survivors are definitely more intelligent in this game and receive less friendly fire damage from you (thank god), they are much more squishy to zombie attacks. I had a survivor get stuck in a relatively small swarm of zombies for only roughly 10-15 seconds, and they had almost died on me and costing me my Saint run. That being said, it is definitely and improvement overall and I got the Saint achievement first run from level 0 which is a lot harder in the original.

Infinity mode is another thing that was changed a little. They added a change for zombies to drop random items whether it be weapons or even small food items. However, this is a very small chance for food and it is not usually going to save you from dying. However, the ability to save in infinity mode is SO nice. I despised having to do my original 7 day run in one go for 14 hours which most of which is spent waiting. This wasn't fun, or even satisfying when I did do it. And yes, you can skip time in infinity mode too which is also super nice. Just keep an eye on your health bar.

- Grind
The grind honestly felt about the same overall. However, the first few levels seemed to come INCREDIBLY fast. I got to level 15 before I even finished the first case. However, it levels out around level 20 where you have to get a lot PP in order to level up. So it took me about the same amount of time to hit level 50 as the original. I imagine the first few levels were for newer players which is okay if you ask me.

- Story
The story is the same, so I'll take this time to give my opinion on the voice actor changes. There is no doubt that the acting is a step down from the original game. However, I don't think it is quite as bad as people make it out to be. Nobody will be winning any Emmys for this but it's not horrendous like people say. Even Frank's new voice actor grew on me a little more as I progressed. However, I do miss old voice actor, TJ Storm a lot. That one was a hard change.

- Game Time
I managed to get all but the Infinity mode achievements in roughly 14 hours. A lot of achievements have changed or were removed and are easier to get. Got mixed feelings on that.

- Price
Honestly, I'd wait for a sale. $50 is pretty steep for an 18 year old game with a graphical update.

- Bugs
I ran into a quite a few shuddering problems and a 3 crashes in my first run. Nothing game breaking but hopefully these get smoothed out with updates.

Final Rating & Conclusion: It's a very solid remake/remaster of Dead Rising. For the most part, it respects everything the original game did while adding nice QoL changes to make the game more accessible for new players. It's definitely the best way to play Dead Rising now in my opinion. However, I still think people should check out the original and judge that for themselves.

* 7/10 *

---{ Graphics }---
☐ You forget what reality is
☑ Beautiful
☐ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS

Deep Rock Galactic has an art style like absolutely no other. There are several different biomes in the planet you travel to that are all breathtaking in their own way. Some look better than others, but they all look at least great.

---{ Gameplay }---
☑ Very good
☑ Very good with friends
☐ Good
☐ Good with friends
☐ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't

By far, one of the best and most fun gameplay loops there are, especially for more casual PvE players. You have the option to play as 1 of 4 dwarves each with their own weapon set and and playstyle. However, all of them are fun in their own way. Scout for traveling around the caves fast with more limited firepower. Gunner with extremely heavy and hard-hitting weapons with not much traversial. Driller which leads hard into crowd control with unique weapons and drills which can be used to create new paths for you and your team to traverse through. And finally my personal favorite, Engineer, which, like the engineer from Team Fortress 2, can build one or two sentry guns (depending on your build) to support the team in combat, build platforms to help the team reach hard to reach places, and has his own unique arsenal weapons which can pack quite a punch. These four can play together to make a gameplay loop that is absolutely addictive. And with everything in the game being unlocked through playing, there is no end to the fun.

I think my favorite part is you don't need to play with JUST friends. This game has one of the most friendliest and welcoming communities I have ever seen in an online game. Even long-time players like myself welcome new players with open arms for the most part and are more than willing to help them learn. And veteran players like me still make new friends in this game almost regularly. The game's cooperative nature, shared experience, and community-oriented developers are what helped build this. I am so happy to say you can safely join public games and USUALLY not feel too pressured. :)

It is also fun for solo play as well. The devs added a robot known as "Bosco" to assist specifically during solo or offline play and he is actually quite handy to have around in most missions (albeit, some more than others.) So if you're a sad lonely loser like me, don't worry, Bosco has your back. ;)

---{ Audio }---
☑ Eargasm
☐ Very good
☐ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf

The soundtrack for the game combines electric into an adventure tune and, when applicable, combat. In sounds strange, but it works super well for this game. It is catchy and unique, I could listen to it absolutely all day.

---{ Audience }---
☐ Kids
☑ Teens
☑ Adults
☐ Grandma

Can be enjoyed by anybody. Probably leans more towards teens and adults because of the violence though.

---{ PC Requirements }---
☐ Check if you can run paint
☐ Potato
☑ Decent
☐ Fast
☐ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer

You do not really need that hardware-intense of a system to be able to run this game well. However, it runs beautifully on my 3080ti and even moreso with upscaling.

---{ Game Size }---
☐ Floppy Disk
☑ Old Fashioned
☐ Workable
☐ Big
☐ Will eat 10% of your 1TB hard drive
☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it
☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data

I am absolutely baffled by the fact that this game is only about 3 GB despite the absolutely monster amount of content in the game. You won't need to make much if any sacrifices to get this game installed. :)

---{ Difficulty }---
☐ Just press 'W'
☐ Easy
☑ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Significant brain usage
☐ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls

The game is super easy to pick up and start enjoying, however, to learn absolutely everything it has to offer will take time and practice.

---{ Grind }---
☐ Nothing to grind
☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☐ Isn't necessary to progress
☐ Average grind level
☑ Large amount of grind
☐ Too much grind
☐ You'll need a second life for grinding

This might be the most serious criticism the game gets. I can imagine many would say the game has too much grinding. The reason for this is that NOTHING is unlocked from DLCs, microtransactions, or paid battle passes, everything is unlocked from playing the game. There are a few paid DLCs for the game, but everything is purely cosmetic. I personally bought them all because I love and support these developers. Some items like overclocks require quite some playtime to start unlocking. However, for me, I think while it is a LOT, there are plenty of ways to speed up your grinding. There are plenty of ways of leveling up faster and getting more money. From playing higher difficulties, to looking for specific modifiers on missions, to special events that the devs host pretty frequently. I've unlocked almost everything there is to unlock in roughly 600-800 hours of playtime. Many will think that is a lot, which it is, but the gameplay will not get stale in my opinion. And hey, anything is better than having to spend hundreds of dollars to try to fast-track your grinding.

---{ Story }---
☐ No Story
☑ Some lore
☐ Average
☐ Good
☐ Lovely
☐ It'll replace your life

There really isn't any specific story to follow in the game. There is a lot of lore behind the company you work for, mysteries of the planet you travel to, and other things, but no direct storytelling to speak of aside from some environmental storytelling.

---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short
☐ Average
☐ Long
☑ To infinity and beyond

I have almost 900 hours invested into the game and I am still not tired of it yet.

---{ Price }---
☐ It's free!
☑ Worth the price
☐ If it's on sale
☐ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money

For players who prefer PvE games, this game is SO worth the price AND THEN SOME. However, if you prefer PvP games, I would either avoid this game entirely, or wait for a sale.

---{ Bugs }---
☐ Never heard of
☑ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs

There are a couple miner (pun intended) bugs in the game, however, so small they aren't noticeable for the most part. And any larger bugs are usually patched by the developers pretty quick in my experience. They are incredibly responsive to bug reports.

---{ ? / 10 }---
☐ 1
☐ 2
☐ 3
☐ 4
☐ 5
☐ 6
☐ 7
☐ 8
☐ 9
☑ 10

One of the few games I am more than willing to give a 10/10 rating to. It would honestly be my favorite game of all time if it wasn't for the nostalgia factor of Left 4 Dead 2. Between the game's addictive gameplay loop, incredibly welcoming community, consumer-focused developers, and focus on PvE, this has easily become a game that I can sink so many hours into and never get tired of. Thank you to Ghost Ship Games for giving us this experience, and thank you to the community for getting me into it.

The bug with paintjobs in first person has been fixed! I now think these are some of the coolest armors in the game!

They #fixedTF2....kinda

Well, I WAS enjoying the game. Until I discovered that it crashes...a lot...I'm quite literally soft locked because this damn game crashes so much. And yes, my PC more than meets the recommended requirements...

Ubisoft. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ thieves. After a heated discussion with their support about not being able to "authenticate ownership of this game", they more or less told me I had to repurchase the game through their own launcher on a new ubisoft account if I actually wanna play this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. ♥♥♥♥ Ubisoft and their greedy business practices.

I tried really hard to like this game, I really did. And it is true, the developers have spent a lot of time trying to recapture the gameplay elements that made the first game amazing, but I just can't seem to find a way to like this game anywhere near as much as the first. The gameplay is okay, the parkour is a okay, the combat is....slightly better than par, the graphics are good, the story is weak at best and downright cringy at worst. I still feel like Hakon would have made a better main character than Aiden ever would have. However, the stability is my biggest issue. I have a very high end PC, yet still seem to run into studdering issues. And a big problem is that after playing the game for a while, the frame rate just seems to tank into the 20s and 30s and the only fix is to restart it. However, I don't feel like having to restart my game every hour or so and this is an issue I ONLY have with THIS game and no others, some of which are even more demanding than this one. On top of that, the game REALLY needs to stop trying to force me to link an Epic account. Every time the game boots up, it minimizes and forces your default browser to open up an Epic login screen. That is 100% not okay and needs to stop. I am completely against Epic Games and it's launcher. This game needs a serious stability update before I'll even think about recommending this game.

---{ Graphics }---
☐ You forget what reality is
☐ Beautiful
☐ Good
☑ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS

The game has an interesting art style. Essentially combining the best of both worlds of Minecraft and LA Noire. Looks good without being too overwhelming for what it's trying to achieve.

---{ Gameplay }---
☐ Very good
☑ Good
☐ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't

The game is essentially a detective simulator. The whole city is proceduraly generated similar to that of Deep Rock Galactic which is HUGE plus! The citizens and locations all have unique names, layouts, and information which you can uncover, note down, and possibly even use for later cases. This allows for a different looking city with new citizens every time you start a new game if you want to. Or you can save the seeds of an old city and reuse it if you would like. You can find evidence of murders, or do side jobs like finding a citizen and vandalizing their apartment. You look for evidence including fingerprints, photographs, even looking for surveillance footage of the crime. My only complaint is that many of the parts of a citizen's profile such as blood type, shoe size, and voice ID aren't really utilized in any meaningful way. They can never be used as evidence and it can lead to certain crimes being harder to solve than they should be because that type of evidence is NEVER used.

---{ Audio }---
☐ Eargasm
☐ Very good
☑ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf

The audio is definitely going for an old school Noire theme. The sounds of rain falling, the music in the background and gunshots being fired in the background can be quite immersive. Definitely makes you feel like you're in a depressed city.

---{ Audience }---
☐ Kids
☑ Teens
☑ Adults
☐ Grandma

The art style definitely appeals to a younger audience but the overall thought processing and gameplay as well as violence within can still appeal to adults.

---{ PC Requirements }---
☐ Check if you can run paint
☐ Potato
☑ Decent
☐ Fast
☐ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer

The game is not very graphically heavy. However, for some reason, my 3080ti still tends to struggle on 4k quality. I'm not sure if the game has more going on than what it appears or if the optimization isn't quite there. Either way, you may need to make some accommodations for lower-end PCs.

---{ Game Size }---
☐ Floppy Disk
☑ Old Fashioned
☐ Workable
☐ Big
☐ Will eat 10% of your 1TB hard drive
☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it
☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data

Game requirements say about 4GB of space, however, the files by themselves only take about 1.5 GB. There may be more space required if you intend on saving the seeds of old generated cities but otherwise, hardly any space usage with this one!

---{ Difficulty }---
☐ Just press 'W'
☐ Easy
☑ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Significant brain usage
☐ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls

The game is pretty simple to start picking up on. However, there are a lot of tricks you can learn later on to make solving certain cases much easier. However, once you start to learn a lot of these tricks, the game almost feels TOO easy.

---{ Grind }---
☐ Nothing to grind
☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☑ Isn't necessary to progress
☐ Average grind level
☐ Too much grind
☐ You'll need a second life for grinding

There isn't too much of a grind to this game. You can find "Syncdiscs" to upgrade your character by finding them in apartments or purchasing them down the line, and you can also purchase and decorate an apartment but that's about it. The only requirement for progression is raising your social credit which is done by solving murder cases and side jobs. You could technically complete a game without unlocking a single upgrade or buying an apartment. Hell, you even have the option to have an apartment from the very start of the game.

---{ Story }---
☐ No Story
☑ Some lore
☐ Average
☐ Good
☐ Lovely
☐ It'll replace your life

There's some background lore regarding the world you're in and how it came to be, and some background on the mega corporation running the world, but that's about it unless they add more later down the line.

---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short
☑ Average
☐ Long
☐ To infinity and beyond

This one wasn't easy to place. One of the gameplay settings you can set before you generate your world is game length. Essentially what this changes is how much social credit is required to retire and end the game. However, it doesn't take too terribly long to do so regardless if you ask me.

---{ Price }---
☐ It's free!
☑ Worth the price
☐ If it's on sale
☐ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money

The game is only $20 which is well worth the price if you ask me. The game is in a decent enough state to warrant that price tag and doesn't feel like a rip off. However, if you're not as into single player games, you might want to wait for a sale.

---{ Bugs }---
☐ Never heard of
☐ Minor bugs
☑ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs

I wouldn't say there are terribly many game breaking bugs, however there are quite a few bugs which makes some cases unsolvable which can become annoying rather quick. I would stick to only medium-sized cities to help avoid some of these.

---{ ? / 10 }---
☐ 1
☐ 2
☐ 3
☐ 4
☐ 5
☑ 6
☐ 7
☐ 8
☐ 9
☐ 10

For a single player experience, it's incredibly fun! Definitely worth a buy if you're into crime solving games or games that make you think a bit more.

Welp I would have given this game a positive review, expect there is one absolutely damming bug in Season 1 Episode 3 that literally makes me put a negative review. If you interact with the car behind the head train car, the cursor bugs out and you cannot move it to the right edge of the screen. Normally that isn't a big deal, you'd just have to work around it until the next scene starts. Unfortunately, there is a part in the same scene where you need the cursor on the right edge of the screen and because of the bug, you cannot do that, making it so you cannot progress. The only fix I have found is to restart the scene, however there is a way to create a checkpoint mid way through the chapter. If you get that checkpoint AFTER triggering the bug like me, it means you CANNOT rewind before the bug triggered and now there is no way to restart the scene. The only fix now is restart FROM EPISODE TWO as Skybound in their infinite ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ wisdom has decided to remove the rewind feature from the definitive edition so you can't just restart the episode or the chapter. So a game breaking bug that Skybound refuses to fix, and no way to fix it easier due to a nice feature that Skybound to remove from this version of the game. Yeah, that by itself gets this version a thumbs down from me.

I was very much pleasantly surprised with this game. I was not expecting it to be as much fun as it was but here we are. The cooperative game play is some of the most fun I've had in a coop experience since Deep Rock Galactic. You work together as a team to survive the trials and you get punished if you try to play selfishly. Despite it being early access and not as many trials to play, it still feels like a lot of content because of the sheer replayability of the game. The maps or randomly generated each game and some paths you may have taken before could be blocked off or trapped the next play through, forcing you to either find another way or come up with a plan to overcome them. There is also a surprising lack of bugs in the game despite it being early access. I haven't run into ANYTHING game breaking and the few bugs I have encountered are super minor and can be worked around pretty easily.

That being said I do have one complaint and that is that the balance between solo and cooperative play isn't very good. They took a few measures to bridge solo and coop but it doesn't feel like enough. If you pause the game while playing solo...the game doesn't actually pause. Enemies can still attack and kill you. On top of that if you're AFK too long in a solo game, you're kicked for being AFK. It makes sense in a coop game perfectly fine but in solo, your game should pause and you should never be kicked for being AFK. On top of that the difficulty in general isn't scaled too well for solo which is what the Outlast experience was up until this point so I can understand if veterans of the original games find this one a little disappointing.

I imagine with some more balancing, Red Barrel Games could turn this into something close of to masterpiece of a cooperative survival horror experience. However, try not to forget the game IS in early access and is still being worked on. For anybody who's loves cooperative games, I'd highly recommend it! I'd also recommend it to anybody who's played coop survival horror games like Phasmophobia or Demonologist as the games are surprisingly similar in the survival part of the experience. Anybody else, I'd still recommend it but maybe wait until it goes on sale.