UPDATE: Since writing this hands-on preview I have been plagued by massive issues with Dead Rising 3 crashing to desktop almost constantly. At first I thought it was something with my setup, but there are many similar reports so this appears to be a real problem. One suggested fix is to roll back NVIDIA drivers to 335.23, which I haven’t tested yet. Either way, this is a major issue and will definitely negate my recommendation of Dead Rising 3 if it isn’t fixed.
There’s a great new trend that’s been happening recently. Games that were originally console exclusives are making their way to the PC platform. Ryse will be on its way in October, and Dead Rising hits Steam this week. More games on more platforms is always a good thing. Dead Rising 3 was a launch game on the Xbox One, and I had the chance to check out its PC iteration this week. I’ve had limited time with the game thus far, so I won’t be commenting much on the quality of the game itself until I’ve had a chance to get through the main story. For a full review please check out Trevor’s Excellent review of Dead Rising 3 for Xbox One. For our purposes here, I’ll be focusing on how the game looks and performs on PC.
My first impression was that Dead Rising 3 looks really good. It’s not ground-breakingly amazing looking, but it looks very good. What’s really amazing about this game isn’t specifically the texture resolution or lighting effects or any of the factors that normally make up a great looking game, it’s the crowds. The ability for Dead Rising to render massive crowds of zombies is really astounding the first few times you encounter them. These aren’t small combat arenas filled with “background” zombies. Every stumbling meatbag as far as the eye can see is coming at you.
I spent a little time playing with a keyboard and mouse and the controls seem completely competent, but my strong suggestion is for you to use a controller. Being a console port, Dead Rising handles playing with a controller perfectly, and it’s a much more enjoyable way to play. If you want to KB+M, however, you’ll have no problems.
Speaking of problems, here’s one that will be the biggest concern for PC gamers. Dead Rising 3 is frame-locked to 30fps. In my opinion there’s just no good reason for this. Different people have different machines capable of varying framerates, why not let them see what their machine is capable of like every other PC game does? Especially when there’s an easy workaround to unlock the frame-rate, which I’ll tell you now.
Here’s how you very simply unlock the framerate. Open notepad, paste in the following minus quotation marks “gmpcr_unlock_frame_rate = True” and save your document as “user.ini” in the game’s main directory. Done, your framerate is now unlocked. I attempted this myself and my framerate immediately shot up to 60 and stayed there for most of my gametime. For those wondering, I was running the game on an i7-2600 CPU and GeForce GTX 780. The experience is much better at 60fps, so I just can’t understand why the framerate is locked.
I can’t wait to spend some more time with Dead Rising 3 to really get into the story and the weapon crafting system, which seems absolutely insane in the most amazing way. If your PC can handle the relatively hefty specs I’d fully advocate the PC version of Dead Rising as the version of choice, especially with the bundled-in DLC that comes with the Apocalypse Edition. Go forth, and get bloody!