Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster

Posted:  Nov 25, 2024
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Review

Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster was provided by CAPCOM for review. Thank you!

Eighteen years since the release of the original Dead Rising, CAPCOM has brought the classic back with Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster. So, how does this remaster stand up? Does it stick faithfully to the original? Is it perhaps too close to the original? Let's find out!

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The storyline of Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster is identical to the original. Zombies have overrun a small town in Colorado, and photojournalist Frank West has infiltrated the town to get his next big scoop. After getting into the town's shopping mall, where survivors are making their last stand, he now has 72 hours to gather evidence, rescue as many survivors as possible, and find out just what's going on in Willamette, Colorado.

This remaster sticks very closely to the original game in general. The cutscenes are all pretty much identical, except for the improved visuals. The survivors are in the same places, and item pickups/drops are in the same place. The achievements list is very similar, albeit a bit less gritty, and even the voice lines are the same, aside from being re-recorded with new voice actors.

That's not to say all the game is the same, however. As I mentioned, the visuals are greatly improved from the original, adding better shading, extra visual effects, and things such as hair physics on characters. The hair does have a habit of clipping through their bodies/clothes sometimes, which is a little odd. Overall, the visual improvement is nice, and while the game isn't up to par with the latest games around it, it certainly is leaps ahead of the 2006 original.

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It's not just the visuals that are improved, either. The gunplay is better, allowing players to move while aiming and shooting firearms. The game retains a fairly "clunky" feel to movement and combat, which fans of the original might appreciate, but this makes the game feel a lot more modern.

The movement retains the stilted feeling from the CAPCOM games of old, and it's not always as responsive as I'd like. In this regard, the game feels very late 90s, but with slow-moving zombies and the game's somewhat unrealistic portrayal of, well, almost everything, the clunky movement feels acceptable. It's almost as if the original game was planned to follow the vein of the Resident Evil games.

The gameplay has its fun approach to the zombie apocalypse, just as the original did. With weapons ranging from the usual pistols and submachine guns to the zany, with mannequins, coat hangers, katanas, and more! You can even hop into a car in certain areas and rack up some serious zombie kills. Sure, the game isn't as fluid as it could be, but in terms of fairly laid-back fun (considering the apocalyptic situation), Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster is up there.

The photo mechanic is back, and yes, you can just spam photos near the beginning of the game to rack up ludicrous amounts of PP and level up to unfathomable levels before the game truly begins. This mechanic is essentially unchanged from the original game.

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Hit detection with melee weapons isn't the best, often resulting in Frank swinging through enemies, and the game likes to make bosses invincible at certain points, making the fights needlessly difficult. One fight halfway through the game was much more difficult than needed as the boss is often invincible, and there's only a short window where attacks will damage them. It's frustrating, but CAPCOM also decided to stay true to the original. The saving grace is that the remaster has an auto-save feature that saves before encounters like this, so you can simply retry them if you fail.

Another area that was a bit of a bugbear in the original release, and while improved here, is still not as good as I would have hoped, is AI pathfinding. The zombie AI is fine, but they do not do much pathfinding. But your fellow survivor AI still leaves much to be desired. A couple of things were redesigned to help the AI navigate better. Still, I found that the AI gets stuck on walls occasionally, and this is quite frustrating on what is essentially an escort mission each time you find a survivor. It's such a big part of the game that I would have liked to see more work done to fix this.

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Some quality-of-life improvements are brought in with the remaster, such as the ability to advance time at save points. Various objectives and storyline progression become available at different times during the 72-hour game, so if you just want to experience the story or you've completed objectives ahead of time due to being an absolute gamer, then you now have the handy ability to fast-forward until the next objective becomes available, instead of aimlessly wandering like in the original game.

Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster doesn't fix all of the original game's issues, and a couple of them, such as AI Pathfinding, really needed fixing. However, the game retains the charm and silliness of the original title while improving various aspects of its gameplay and adding nicer visuals. As far as remasters go, this is one of the more worthy ones worth checking out.

Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster - Steam Deck Performance

Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster has full controller support, which would be my preferred way to play the game. It also supports 1280x800 resolutions, so there are no black borders for Steam Deck users.

While there are plenty of graphical options to choose from, the game is limited by the Steam Deck's CPU rather than its GPU, so we can't get above 30 FPS no matter what we do, but this does mean we can upgrade some of the visuals without losing any smoothness. Therefore, I'm only offering 1 preset today.

Recommended Settings - 30 FPS

Set the SteamOS frame rate limit to 30. We don't want a TDP limit for this one.

In the in-game settings, I went with the "Prioritize Performance" preset, which you can select near the top of the graphics options menu. Then, I scrolled down and adjusted FSR 3 to "Quality," as I found that that smoothed out the frame times a little, especially when making a quick turn of the camera. Here are the exact settings I used for reference.

These settings hold 30 FPS the whole time, although you may experience slight dips here and there for a second or two when quickly rotating the camera, as the game can struggle to load objects that have been out of sight. If there's a huge number of zombies on the screen, it can dip into the mid-20s in parts, and very, very rare cases, I had dipped into the teens for a few seconds. There's not much we can do about that, but fortunately, it's not all that common, and the game remains playable. Thinning the numbers will increase the FPS fairly quickly.

Power draw held around 16W-21W mostly, with temperatures around 60-70C, depending on the area you're in, and largely based on how many zombies are about.

Steam Deck LCD owners should expect no more than 2 hours of battery life, and Steam Deck OLED users should expect around 2.5 hours.

Accessibility:

Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster has many accessibility features, including a new "Casual" difficulty mode to make things easier. You can enable/disable subtitles and closed captions for different parts of the game, disable camera wobble, and allow holding a button to have the same effect as mashing it in case of quick-time events.

You can also adjust the size of subtitles. However, this only alters the subtitle size for cutscenes and "proper" dialogue. The flavor text of NPC survivors who randomly give hints and chit-chat with Frank can't be made bigger or smaller, which is a shame, as it is by far the smallest text in the game and quite difficult to read on the Steam Deck.

Conclusion:

Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster mostly stays true to the original, for better or worse. While some improvements have been made to AI pathfinding, visuals, and quality of life, a couple of 20-year-old relics remain. For old players, this might fuel their nostalgia; for newer players to the series, it might just prove a little frustrating.

Regardless, Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster is not a game to be taken seriously, and if you can sit back and laugh with it, you'll have a good time.

Performance on the Steam Deck isn't the best, but it's to be expected when you're dealing with large amounts of AI, given the Steam Deck's weaker CPU. Although we can occasionally see dips into the 20s, most of the game runs at 30 FPS, and you can play from start to finish on the Steam Deck and still have a good time. Controller support is also excellent.

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

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SDHQ's Build Score Breakdown

Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster suffers from occasional frame drops, but a usual 30 FPS frame rate and a good control scheme make this game playable on the Steam Deck.

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Oliver Stogden
Oliver began playing video games at an early age, starting with the SNES console and Commodore Amiga computer. Nowadays, his interest is in the future of portable technology, such as handheld gaming systems, portable power stations/banks, and portable monitors. And seeing just how far we can push these devices.
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