Dead Rising 3

With zombies, more is better. Dead Rising 3 delivers the undead and great tools to kill them with by the truckload.

Dead Rising 3 has a lot of fun encouraging you to use its impressive array of barmy, brutal weaponry in an undead city.

The spine of the game is still mashing your way through zombie hordes with elaborate weaponry, and fortunately this remains enjoyable from beginning to end, but having stripped back some of the humour and made the game less colourful and more gritty, it's a shame that the developers weren't able to infuse it with something else to top up its character. It's not as though Capcom Vancouver didn't understand people's love of the originals: when you're not smashing through zombies, you collect golden statues of Frank West, while the local museum has exhibitions dedicated to West and Chuck Greene, his successor in Dead Rising 2.

Dead Rising 3 is a promising, ultimately clumsy next-gen debut

Dead Rising 3 has made its brand of zombie-slaying as much fun as possible, but it needs to fix a lot more than that before it becomes the king of the undead.

The absurd sense of humor and massive crowds of zombies are an irresistible combination. A variety of nagging bugs and glitches distract from the overall joy

Dead Rising 3 is still one of the strongest titles in the PS4/ Xbox One launch line-up, but that's more down to a lack of sharp competition than any peculiar brilliance. A more forgiving proposition than its forebears, this is an enjoyable zombie romp that's lost some of its character in the lurch onto the next generation hardware.

I do think it suffers from significant tonal misjudgements, but it does a very good job of keeping me busy, keeping me pushing pennies into the slot, and keeping me fed with micro-anecdotes that, though they might dissipate immediately, are instantly replaced by new ones.

Although it sacrifices a tad of its loveable camp factor and neon style in favor of a few other advancements, the outcome is a much stronger, more involved Dead Rising game. For once, I actually felt overwhelmed in a zombie outbreak, which is a real example of how next-gen technology can be used to do more than simply "make things look better." Out of all the launch titles I've played on both new consoles, Dead Rising 3 is my personal favorite, bar none.

Easily enjoyable enough to recommend, though its ambitious scale and satisfying zombie slashing are undercut by frustrating design and clueless writing.