Review: Dead Rising 3: The Last Agent

Stick a fork in this Season Pass

So far we’ve had three pieces of underwhelming Dead Rising 3 DLC, in the form of Operation Broken Eagle, Fallen Angel, and Chaos Rising. That’s three parts of the four-part Season Pass, and now all that’s left is The Last Agent.

It’s a shame Capcom decided to charge money for these.

Dead Rising 3: The Last Agent (Xbox One)
Developer: Capcom Vancouver
Publisher: Microsoft Studios
Release Date: March 18, 2014
MSRP: $9.99

Angel is the only character worth a damn that’s been presented in the Season Pass offerings so far, and sadly, the ZDC’s Brad Park is another swing and a miss. As a “good guy” stuck in the middle of the outbreak in Los Perdidos, Brad actually runs into Nick at the beginning of the DLC, tying his story into the main one in a similar vein as Angel. It all goes downhill from here, as he basically has no personality and neither do his missions.

Rather than immediately follow-up with some revelatory moment that would draw us more into the world of Dead Rising 3, Brad reports to a local hospital, where he proceeds to run errands for a doctor named Cora. You’ll spend the next hour driving around town finding Zombrex and fighting carbon-copy biker enemies from the core game.

To make matters worse, one of Brad’s “unique” mission types (a theme of each DLC) is to rescue survivors, just like Nick does in the story. Yeah it makes sense since he’s there to help as the ZDC, but it just comes off as an even lazier attempt to copy and paste elements into a piece of paid DLC.

It also doesn’t help that this mission inexplicably has more blocked off areas than any other piece of content, forcing players to drive around the long way to locate quest objectives. It really feels like Capcom ran out of their budget right around the time that The Last Agent was put into production. As always though, it’s still fun to run around and blast zombies into oblivion, and the new item types help make that more tempting.

Thankfully there are six new weapon types to find (the highlight of which is a robotic-like arm) and a new vehicle, all of which are incorporated into Nicks’ story — so if you already bought the Season Pass (my condolences), at least you’re getting something for your troubles. The weapons themselves are mostly guns, too, and are probably the strongest item pack yet.

Considering that Dead Rising 3 was one of my favorite games of last year, this Season Pass collection is a real shame. Capcom cut corners at nearly every turn, and instead of putting up all four stories as one big expansion, the company charged for them individually. Save your money and just play the core game instead, or wait for a Game of the Year edition.