Clearly, Dead Rising 4 is rebooting the series. It’s an entertaining beat’em up, albeit one where I haven’t had a chance to play online ahead of launch. I still think it’s a great way to spend the holidays, but people who appreciated the earlier games may want to watch some gameplay videos or try a demo first.

Saga fans and newbies will both enjoy Dead Rising 4. The first will enjoy it because there are zombies and a thousand ways to finish’em. The newbies because it is not a Dead Rising at all. Capcom Vancouver has left behind the elements that made great the original Dead Rising, but presents a more classical (and western) system, which will hook those players looking only for a good time in front of their consoles.

Mindless, stupid fun.

Dead Rising 4 is a lot of fun, but the challenge and tension that made the first few games so unique are dead and buried.

On many levels Dead Rising 4 is a disappointment, content to riff on the slapstick violence and revive past glories but showing no real desire to do anything new. There's precious little depth and the combat is shallow, while some sections seem designed to show up Frank's inability to cope with tooled-up human foes. Yet there's something weirdly cheerful and festive about Frank's misadventures, about crafting homebrew weaponry and putting it to work.

Dead Rising 4 is a good game which takes most of the previous mechanics but forgets, once again, to implement the time limit we loved in the first episode. Some will be pleased, but the hardcore fans of the series won't.

An unfunny and unfun mess of a game, Dead Rising 4 is a shambling corpse of a once-great franchise. Capcom would be wise to put it out of its misery.