Dead Rising was the game that pushed me to get a Xbox 360 in the first place. It epitomized a next-generation game and presented something I'd never been able to do before. Now, almost 20 years later, Capcom's other major zombie franchise is getting a reboot with the half-remake/half-remaster Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster (shortened to DRDR, at the game's insistence). It's a chance to go back in time and revisit one of the coolest zombie games of all time.

If you've never played the original Dead Rising, the easiest way to describe it is "Dawn of the Dead" as a video game. You take the role of somewhat scummy freelance reporter Frank West as he charters a helicopter into a military-quarantined city. After being forced to disembark at the local mall, he finds the town infested by zombies. Now he's going to make use of his wits, his camera, and the entire supply of an early 2000s shopping mall to survive, find the source of the outbreak, and escape to become famous.

Dead Rising is arguing the first big zombie sandbox game. It took the premise of an American mall filled with zombies and offered the player the chance to do whatever they wanted. The main mode in the game is "72 hours" where you have 72 in-game hours to try to solve the mystery — or just beat up zombies with household appliances. Should you die or fail, you can restart with your previous experience points and knowledge. It's a simple but appealing concept, and the mall is the star of the show with an absurd number of shops, attractions, and theaters.

Obviously, the biggest change is that the entire game has been remade in Capcom's near-miracle RE engine, which looks phenomenal. We were allowed to play in some of the game's earlier areas, and it's amazing to see how much detail is packed into every ounce of the environment. Everything has gotten an update, and even basic storefronts have more going on than they did before. All the character models have been redone, as has the voice acting. Initially, I was hesitant about the change to the voice actors, but they do their job well, and it's a necessity considering the game is now fully voice acted. That itself is a great change that gives the game more weight.

DRDR is clearly a game made by people who played the original and are intimately familiar with the complaints about it. Indeed, just in the opening area of the game, there are a ton of little things that delighted me. One of the very first things you see after the opening moments is that the developers have added a set of steps to the entrance to the safe house. If you never played the original Dead Rising, that entrance used to be a set of ledges that the survivor AI would frequently struggle with, making it a chore to shepherd survivors to the safehouse. Now they just run up like it's nothing. In fact, survivors in general seem to have better AI. I only rescued a few during our playthrough, but they seemed a lot more reliable than I remember from the original game, where keeping them alive was more like pulling teeth.

There are plenty of small things like that. Moves that required players to double-tap a direction, like the flying dodge, are now done with simple button presses to drastically reduce the chance for input mistakes. Otis, the bane of many a DR1 player's existence, is now far more affable. You can move and react when you get a radio call, which means you won't get him constantly harassing you for hanging up on him because you were mid-zombie attack. Gunplay is more like what it is in the sequels, where you can move and aim at the same time, so it's a lot less tedious to use guns against enemies, such as the game's first "boss," the gun-wielding Carlito.

There are also changes to the basic gameplay in interesting ways. For example, large objects don't just serve as convenient battering rams but can now be shields. This allows you to block thrown objects and bullets; this is sure to come in handy against some of the bosses. Each item also now has a clear durability meter that shows how close it is to breaking, so it's much easier to figure out if you should ditch the weapon you're holding and move on to something else.

One of the other changes is to costumes. When you find a costume piece, you can instantly requip it from your saferoom, so it's far easier to make Frank look stylish or dress him in a Servbot helmet and a stylish dress. In addition, there are going to be a batch of DLC costumes based on popular Capcom properties like Resident Evil and Mega Man. These don't appear to replace the similar costumes in the main game (the Mega Buster toy weapon is still accessible). Instead, they're more like goofy extras with some cosmetic effects. I was a bit worried about the costumes when I first heard about them, but the costumes we saw in the preview build felt more like fun than pay-to-win.

Overall, Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster is shaping up to be an excellent remaster. The time that I spent with DRDR reminded me of the recent Dead Space remake in that rather than feeling like a brand-new game, it feels like the game I remembered from my memories. Everything from the gameplay improvements to the updated graphics feel right and captures nostalgia while being quite a bit different under the surface. I'm looking forward to seeing how the full game pans out when it hits consoles and the PC on Sept. 19, 2024.