[h1]Pros[/h1]
- [b]Much smoother controls.[/b]
Compared to DR1 and 2, you can move faster, sprint, QTEs are just one button press instead of wiggling the mouse or multiple prompts, crafting combo gear can be done faster and on the fly, it’s great to finally play a Dead Rising game that doesn’t constantly annoy you with shoddy controls.
- [b]Self reliant survivors.[/b]
To rescue survivors, you just kill off the zombies around them or come across them in side missions, and they’ll either flee on their own or join you but as part of a “posse” where they just return to the safe house if abandoned/drained of health, so you don’t have to constantly babysit them or play 50-100 repeat escort missions.
- [b]Skill customisation.[/b]
Rather than upgrades being given out on a fixed schedule like in DR1 or semi-randomised like in 2, 3 lets you choose where your points are invested in a skill tree, with each category being broadly useful.
- [b]Freer progression.[/b]
In DR1 and 2 all missions, whether that's side content or the main story, happened at scheduled intervals, forcing you into a pre-designed schedule with sizable stretches of downtime. DR3 instead lets you initiate story missions at your own pace and dishes out side missions after a story chapter is completed, although this removes an element of challenge from the game and getting spammed with side jobs after hitting story milestones feels clunky compared to the very deliberate schedules of the original games, getting the opportunity to speed or slow the pace yourself makes progress feel much smoother.
- [b]Excellent soundtrack.[/b]
Oozing in synth, very nice.
- [b]Engaging tone.[/b]
Although it has a darker, grittier feel to earlier DR games it still very much has that B-Movie comical vibe behind it as well, so it feels like a good middleground in many ways.
[h1]Cons[/h1]
- [b]Timer imbalance.[/b]
The timer was the core of past DR games but 3 really struggles with it. Normal mode gives you 10 irl minutes per in-game hour, meaning 4 hours per in-game day, with 6 days available you have 24 hours to finish the game, making it completely irrelevant, you can 100% the game with 2-3 days left, in my Normal Mode run I reached the finale with all side missions complete (only collectibles left) at 3 days 18 hours remaining, or 15 hours irl.
Nightmare Mode gives you an alternative, increasing the passing of time by 4x to 2 minutes and 30 seconds per hour (1 hour per day), making the per-day timer double as fast as the earlier games.
Since you have 3 extra days compared to them that technically leaves you with the same amount of time overall as you had with the earlier games, 6 hours, but since DR3 is much bigger you just don’t have enough time to finish much side content in Nightmare, so you have to choose between the timer being pointless and overly harsh, with no middleground like 1 and 2 where the timer is tense but you still have enough room to do everything if you’re skilled/knowledgeable.
- [b]Tedious travel.[/b]
The city districts constantly have roadblocks or debris that force you to dismount vehicles and continue on foot, and they’re split into 4 urban islands connected by highways, the highways have more of those blocks and sometimes require tedious traversal like having to u-turn to get through, it’s not a huge issue but gets annoying as cross district travel is super frequent.
It's seemingly the product of this being an early 8th generation launch title and the first Dead Rising game to ditch loading screens, so because they were shoddy at loading the map chunks they use these blockages to slow you down.
- [b]Slow levelling.[/b]
A staple of the series except for DRDR. My first run, getting the best ending on Nightmare Mode with all Psychopaths killed, several side missions finished and numerous survivors saved, only got me to level 21 out of 50, unless you use exploitative farming techniques you have to do multiple playthroughs to actually utilise Nick’s skill set, where I wish you could've gotten to max or a few levels shy of it in one run to really experience that growth in power.
- [b]Settings dementia.[/b]
The game will force you to pick your gamma settings again every time it launches, and if you turned on subtitles they’ll be off again on relaunch, minor tedium, but still tedium.
- [b]FPS cap.[/b]
The game is locked to a max of 30FPS, you have to use special tricks in the file folder to unlock it and it can bug out if you do, the game feels smooth enough even so, so I don’t really care, but that’s just stupid design.
[h1]Conclusion[/h1]
DR3 easily takes its place as my favourite game in the series, although the core timer system of the series is highly diminished the smoother controls, player driven skill tree, freer progression, the removal of annoying escorts and drawn out quick time events iron out the vast majority of the tedium the series formula involved and let it focus on its unique, arcadey horde slaying.
Although its FPS cap is annoying it's the smoothest PC port in the series besides DRDR, compared to the exhausting tedium DR2 can often involve or the shoddy execution of DR4, 3 feels like a breath of fresh air.
The price feels a bit steep for a game that’s now 12 years old, so like the other games I’d recommend it best on sale, but ultimately it’s a genuinely great game well worth several playthroughs, the only real area it struggles in is difficulty, not only on the timer but other areas too, Normal is so easy I didn’t die once and I’ve seen many say the same, Nightmare is a decent challenge with some segments being outright frustrating, but still kind of the better experience since it has some grit to it.
I’d recommend doing a Nightmare playthrough first, then a Normal run doing the side content as a cooloff or completionism run, either way, very fun game with far more improvements brought to the table than missteps.
