The year is 2006. The remake of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead has dropped two years earlier, as did its iconic parody in Shaun of the Dead. Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead is still a few years from dominating our TV screens. Zombie horror love is bubbling. Schoolyard debates are all about how you’d survive in a zombie apocalypse; how you’d bunker down in a shopping mall and use its endless resources in your zombie slaying. Dead Rising comes out this year, letting players live out this very fantasy. 18 years later with its HD remaster in the freshly released Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster, it’s clear this fantasy is timeless.

Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster follows photojournalist Frank West who’s found himself trapped in a mall with a few survivors and hundreds upon hundreds more of the undead. This shopping district appears to be ground zero and you’ve got 72 hours to solve this mystery and follow your scoops. If not, your helicopter ride taking you out of hell is departing without you. The clock is ticking.

This simple idea was compelling in the original Dead Rising, and it’s no different in the Deluxe Remaster. Across those 72 hours, players have to monitor the game’s clock (found on a wristwatch on Frank’s person) and save, pick up, and lead survivors to safety where he can. The one problem is that human, alive psychopaths and freaks wait around every corner, out for your blood.

These interactions are fittingly tense and challenging while remaining as camp as the franchise is known for. A manager of a supermarket store is offended at your trespassing and charges at you through the aisles with a shopping cart fitted with knives, machetes and spikes. A killer clown will throw bombs and spit fire at you. Even a butcher with a thirst for human meat will threaten your well-being. These are detailed in richly detailed cutscenes that introduce the gross and grisly psychos before it comes to the big battle. Though hard obstacles to overcome, these encounters remain a highlight and a good refresher from traditional zombie slaying.

Electric guitars that make a musical cue strum as you flail them about between foes. A heavy potted plant can be slammed onto a zombie’s head devastatingly. A baseball bat from a sports store. CDs from that music store are thrown like jagged harsh frisbees—lawnmowers you can use to mow down foes. The list of available weapons feels endless and all more arcadey fun than the last. The gameplay is deliberately a little jank as you’ll strafe around and circle enemies to get the trajectory of that sledgehammer slam just right. That’s par for the course and part of the fun. 

Little has changed here except for the crucial fact that you can now move while aiming down the sights of a gun or going to throw a weapon. This feels akin to the fluid and satisfying over-the-shoulder feeling that the recent Resident Evil remakes employ, only more so. Turning quickly in your path is smoother and you feel less like a barrelling brick shithouse but also not too loosey-goosey. I can definitely see people missing that original feeling but it’s a happy medium between the two.

That arcade-like design is found in all the challenges and feats you’re working towards in-game. Dead Rising was, and still is, well ahead of its time with progressions that don’t feel muddy or grindy — skill trees aren’t present at all. Killing X amount of zombies or an odd task will unlock another cosmetic. Levelling up will net you a simple extra blip to Frank’s health or a new brawling ability that lets you suplex a zombie. This game is filled to the brim with simplistic but meaningful upgrades that change your play. Even in this hectic zombie game, you get to truly put on Frank’s photographer shoes and snap pictures about the place, staging the perfect shot to stack up those experience points. I always adore when games find excuses to throw their own version of Pokémon Snap in, no matter how thinly veiled that reason may be.

Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster has also employed lots of clever little changes and additions. Survivor AI is smarter, meaning you’ve got more of a fighting chance to keep more alive but it’s not so much so that it holds your hand. I only managed to keep about 15 odd alive, still well off the very difficult challenge and trophy-based task of 50. Sound design, lighting and visual fidelity are better than ever too. The flickering LED of a storefront sign is captivating and does well in feeling like you’re walking on haunted grounds. You more or less are too; the mall is littered with the undead, all letting out satisfying and juicy squelches as their heads get caved in with Frank’s third consecutive drop kick. I have chills just thinking about how good and tactile combat sounds feel. 

There are small areas where this Remaster feels a little less ‘deluxe’ than promised. It’s not without some small visual bugs such as zombie blood splatters lingering and glitching in the air or one particular late cutscene where Frank was for some reason invisible as another character talked at empty air. Not all characters have fared the remastered treatment well either, some have clipping hair or uncanny expressions that I can’t label as anything else except looking like they were rigged in Garry’s Mod. All I’m saying is, though this too is an RE Engine project like many recent Capcom games, don’t expect the level of polish of say, a brand new Resident Evil game. 

Thankfully, these issues are largely few and far between but they become more apparent when you consider the fact that Dead Rising was already a stellar game as is. Changes could’ve been made to more needed areas such as the hoops you have to jump through in the game’s closing moments; how underpowered you can be to a new type of enemy introduced, the annoying fail states you can get in this portion and so on. I love this game but I would be a very happy woman if I never had to play some of those final moments ever again.

At the end of the day, I can never be mad at Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster all that much. For all it’s faults, its important as a piece of history as a hell of a schlockfest and as the most fun zombie game to date. Between this digital release and a physical one later this year, having a place to play Dead Rising is quite simply good enough for me. Coming at a cool 12 hours which can balloon once you explore and master the endless mode and all its various challenges, it’s hard to stick your nose up at Capcom going back to one of their franchises previously thought to be dead.