GotY 2014: #9 Dead Rising 3

It is now Day 3 of my GotY blogs, with today being all about my 9th best game of the year, Dead Rising 3. Let's get to it.

If you missed #10 or my Honorable Mentions, just click on the links.

Dead Rising 3

My history with this series is also one where this is the first one that I played. I did try out Dead Rising but not enough to truly decide if I liked it or not. I can say that I really enjoyed this game though. The time I was playing this game was during the summer and this is a perfect summer game. I am a teacher so I have plenty of time during that time of year and this game has plenty of things for you to do. The various weapons challenges are really fun to mess around in, the escort missions with survivors are so well done in that they follow you safely and are able to fight and not be babysat. If any game companies are thinking of doing escort missions, please look to this game to see how to do them well.

Now, let's talk about the story. This game has a truly good story from my point of view. You actually care about the characters and know that they knew each other before everything went to hell. My favorite character is the mob bodyguard who you learn is looking for his wife and wanting to fix things up with her. She is actually the woman who has been with you the entire game and their reunion was one that actually affected me. Nick is a great character who never seems to get to that crazy badass phase that characters in games like this arrive at. He always stays grounded and is always a little freaked out about what is going on. It's great to see how they bring characters from the other games into this one and it is also well done.

One of the other things that I really enjoyed about this game are the crazy weapons. The Ultimate Grim Reaper that was shown on UPF after the game came out is amazing and so much fun to use. The other weapons, like the chainsaw/sledgehammer combo weapon was wonderful as well. You were encouraged to use them all to try and figure out which ones you liked the best, which most games do not actually do. I did find about 4 or 5 that I was consistently rolling with throughout the game but when I found a new one, I would always try it out for a period of time to see if I liked it or not.

While I really liked this game, there are a some reasons that kept it from being higher on this list. The first thing is that the movement in the game feels very floaty and it feels like I'm fighting against them every once in a while. When I'm running around and trying to jump from car to car, I have to stop and think about when I'm going to jump and how I'm going to move. I think that when you're in an open world game you should know exactly where you want to move and believe that you'll make that jump every time.

Another thing that bothers me is that once you get some of the better weapons in the game, the challenge disappears. When you fight any of the psychopaths, if you have a great weapon, it is super easy to make it through the encounter. The psychopaths are there for a reason but when you can annihilate them in about two minutes because the weapon you have is amazing, then the challenge is sucked out of it and it becomes something you do and not something you want to do. This has been a problem for awhile with games of all kinds and I hope that someone in the future figures out how to make boss fights better.

Thanks once again for reading. It's time to finish for today and get ready for tomorrow. I hope the wolves don't come and start a new order before then.

HT101