Dead Rising 3 felt way more arcade-y to me compared to what I remember from the second game; You had to die and restart from the beginning in order to improve your chances on your subsequent runs. Dead Rising 3 is nothing of the sort, I've managed to play a good chunk of the game without ever dying - although there were some tight spots here and there - and besides a few bosses that took way more punishment than regular zombie hordes, the game was pretty easily in general. I still had fun with it, going from objective to objective, building weird weapons and exploring around the streets of Los Perdidos.
Even for a game that probably plays better on a controller, Dead Rising 3 worked fairly well on PC, the game walked you through most of the actions you can execute and there are only a few keys to remember here and there - most important prompts are showed on-screen, so even if you have to press Z or some other key in specific situations, it's no big deal - I felt that it was a bit frustrating to 'aim' at specific items you want to pick up, especially when there's so much junk laying around, but that just made me lose some time, so it's no big deal.
I really enjoyed the scope of the city, mostly. Los Perdidos is a large place and some spots are so overrun by zombies that it's the undead as far as the eye can see. This is especially fun with the kind of weapons the game gives you. Lightning hammers, guns that can let you mow down large groups of zombies at the same time, various melee weaponry and super explosives, I never had managed to get that far in DR2 so the novelty of destroying horde after horde of mindless foes wasn't already lost on me. I kinda enjoyed the weapon crafting system; On one hand, mixing two things together to produce a cool new weapon is fun, on the other, it's a bit annoying to lug random parts in your limited inventory; you can't just mix and match with anything; you get storage lockers that allow you to get almost unlimited weapons, so you get comfortable with the stuff you're already using and you don't experiment much. Luckily, the game gives you blueprint with materials nearby, so you have the option to quickly try mixing things up.
I enjoyed the score of the city except in the transportation department. I understand that adding fast travel would mean a really quick completion time and that you would miss on a ton of collectibles - frank statues, destroyable speakers and special markers to find out on your map - but it takes a really long time to go from one point to another, especially since most roads are blocked so vehicles can only go so far - and you get almost no experience killing enemies in a car, adding insult to injury. Walking around is fun, but it takes a long time, and some missions literally ask you to do back-and-forth between two opposite sides. I kinda wish you could fast travel between safehouses, at least.
There are a few boss fights in this game, and they're okay. I just run into them with really good weapons and a few healing items and they didn't give me any trouble, but they're interesting in their own way and you can use special moves on all the bosses. Besides them, there are special enemies like firefighters and police officers that give more experience when you kill them. It's really fun to just go into a crowd of zombies and start raking the experience multiplier with your special weapons and get tons of PP to spend on upgrading your character. I enjoyed the character customization system, but I kinda wish there were more places to spend your PP without just wasting them away. I wanted to make a ranged character - and there were a few other good stats, like life and inventory size - but after a while, you've maxed everything, and then you either put points into random things, or you hoard them. Maybe they should've given less attribute points per level?
I had fun with Dead Rising 3! You can just keep on killing zombies for long swaths of time, do special challenges - that mostly involve killing zombies - save people, watch them die because their AI is kinda dumb, do side quests - or just beeline through the main story - and customize your character's appearance in plenty of funny ways. It's a good zombie game, it's not too difficult and it's fun to play, what's there not to like?
