Dead Rising 3 Apocalypse Edition: 2025 short review

After the slog of Dying Light: The Beast, I needed some actual zombie killing fun. Dead Rising 3 was on sale, and since I'd only played it once 11 years ago, I jumped back in with a friend. The difference was staggering. It actually remembered that the point of an action zombie game is to have fun killing zombies.

Our first hour wasn't spent looting trash or following waypoints; we just explored and mulched zombies with whatever we could find. It’s still impressive how they managed to pack the screen with hundreds of zombies back then, creating a dense playground for slaughter. While the first game had a certain magic that's never been replicated, DR3's gameplay is easily the most refined and simply enjoyable in the series.

The game knows it's B-movie trash and leans into it hard. You can wear a mankini during a 'serious' cutscene. You can make a megaphone that shouts zombies to re-death. More importantly, its systems are designed to help you have fun, not waste your time. Side missions pop up on your route. Blueprints are often right next to the parts you need. The awful survivor escorts are gone; now you can arm a posse of up to five people you helped, suddenly apocalypse is just another word for "a party". The game's entire purpose is to give you a toybox and let you have fun with it, not to pretend it's some grim, prestigious art piece.

This is why an 11-year-old game feels so vital now: it has a personality and isn't afraid of what it is. Playing it today, I kept having moments of, "huh, you really don't see that sort of thing in games anymore." It's a relic from a time before every major release felt HR-safe and corporately sterile, before everything was sanded down by the pretentious and toxic 'sensibilities' that now plague western development.

Let's be blunt. You would never get a character like Hilde, the sexy, clearly evil, and perverted spec-ops psycho, in a game made today. She'd be rewritten with a tragic backstory or desexualised to make her 'strong' but not 'problematic'. And a boss like Darlene, the hilarious, grotesque, and extremely memorable glutton on a mobility scooter? She would be cut from the first pitch meeting for fear of a Twitter backlash. Yet, a character like the male 'Lust' psycho, Dylan, the cowboy with the phallic flamethrower, would probably still get a pass, because he's a man and he's bad, and a sexualised bad man's no problem at all.

Look no further than Capcom's own recent Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster. They took the original 2006 game and gutted it for modern audiences. The "Erotica" category for photography was completely removed. A key boss, the butcher Larry Chiang, was race-swapped to avoid stereotypes. Another boss, the Vietnam vet Cliff, had his dialogue neutered, changing his PTSD-fuelled rants about "filthy communists" to generic insults like "filthy animal".

They are actively gutting their own history to appease a standard that didn't exist then, proving our entire point for us. They are telling you, loud and clear, that they would not make the original Dead Rising today.

Dead Rising 3 is a product from the last moment before this corporate cowardice took hold, a time when you could still have weird, memorable, and sometimes offensive characters without a committee of sensitivity readers gutting your game's soul.