alright, time for some rant here
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DR4 has improved alot on certain parts and has made the zombie killing more enjoyable while aslo gutting alot of what made the series great.
for example you now have a compact inventory system , with melee , throwable weapons and firearms and having food as intant healthpacks, you can no longer throw weapons that aren't for that certain category, alot of brawling moves that frank had aren't making a return, some of them are linked to weapons like the double lariat or quick time events instead of letting you do some of these freely like in past tittles.
the enemies while most of the times there are thousands are thousands of zombies they feel like very little due to how overpowered you are even at the start of the game and nope theres no difficulty settings here, even the evo zombies and the freshly infected rarely pose a threat to the player also it doesn't help that theres a ridiculous amount of food lying around, it gets easier if you decide to unlock a certain skill that lets you get healthpacks from defeated soldiers and enemies, not even the normal soldiers and exo suit soldiers are that much of a threat if you're well armed, but then again most of these die in 3 hits, the exo troopers with flamethrowers are the hardest to fight againts, but they don't have enough animations to fight you and give you a bad time, they're mostly anoying to deal with most of the time rather than a challenge.
the maniacs are abysmal, they ended up being what I feared them to be, watered down unchallenging rushed excuses of bosses with no much personality and no challenge whatsoever, the only bosses that still feel proper but are still rather easy to take down are story related bosses, also theres only 1 or 2 proper psychopaths in this whole game, alot of these could have been really challenging if they added these in past games, but here they just seem like complete jokes...
the side missions and survivors, this is the most bland aspect of the game, they took the rather lameish aspects of the stranded survivors from DR3 and amped that to 11, even those had way more personality to them than these guys, the missions vary from 3 generic as hell missions and then rescue the survivor or destroy obscuris equipment or kill the troopers and free the survivors, or kill zombies and free the survivor.
the vendors, while it was a nice touch and a good step to water down the abuse of the OP weapons that 3 had, alot of the vendors don't offer much variety of weapons , almost all of them sell the same stuff, the clothing vendor seem the most useless of them all, due that most of the clothes they sell, you'll find them at the mall at the start, couldn't they just put hard to get outfits and really expensive clothes, or after beating the game they could have more clothes variations thats nowhere to be seen, or something cool like adding new set of clothes each week that didn't make the cut on the main game dunno.
theres no day/night cycle, and its only triggered by story missions, why would they do that????
now , onto frank, frank's personality seems on par with what we've seen in case west and part of off the record, but jesus some parts fell flat and some jokes ended up being really weak or ended up downright cringeworthy, they had 3 writers onto this game, and only 1 felt good to write a proper dead rising story or maybe the story could have been a bit longer, dunno. they could have written frank in a better way, with less jokes or making them more subtle.
other problems is that theres half combo weapons that there were in DR3, its a given all the weapons we have in this game are amazing , but why getting rid of half the content??, also overtime mode is dlc I believe, don't take my word, it better be damn worth it.
what they could have done is take DR3 , add some of these mechanics , improve on what people disliked of 3 and add more of DR1 and 2 into it and add difficulty settings. there , easy, could have been the best dead rising but it ended up being the worst for me atleast
tl;dr DR4 is a game with improved mechanics , pretty map, its also pretty damn fun at times but it has alot of stripped content and watered down overall. stick with DR1-3