Dead Rising 4: Tips and Tricks for Beginners

Spend Your Skill Points Carefully

While you can arguably make your way through the entirety of Dead Rising 4 without having to drop a skill point, it’s certainly worth your time to invest in the perks system. After all, who wants to turn down regenerating health when you’re an inch from death, or an increased chance of landing critical hits with your ranged weapons?

Even more importantly, take some time at the start of the game to not only look at the skills available to you now but where you might want to invest your points in the future. Doing so can avoid you from needlessly investing points into skills you’re not going to use, further delaying you from being able to get the ones that could really benefit you.

Explore

Dead Rising 4 takes the zombie-killing action to a whole new scale thanks to its huge open world. Unlike Frank’s first visit to Willamette mall, Dead Rising 4 allows players to go out and explore the surrounding neighborhoods. While it may be easy enough to simply follow the quest objective markers and ignore everything that you’re passing by, doing so will more than likely see you missing out on some seriously cool weapon blueprints, as well as a whole host of other collectibles.

Don’t worry about the time constraints of Dead Rising 4’s predecessors either as this latest title completely does away with the 72 in-game hour time limit and lets you explore at your own leisure. Embrace this new-found freedom and head out into the far stretches of Willamette.

Combine Weapons

In a tight squeeze, you’ve probably already picked up the hammer that’s lying on the floor to mash a zombie’s face in. And for the most part, that’ll do just fine. However, when you turn a corner to see a couple hundred more waiting for you, that hammer isn’t going to go far on its own.

One of the most important tips we can offer, not only for your advancement in the game, but for enjoying it to its fullest potential, is to search for blueprints and combine the basic weapons that you’ll find lying around the world. When you’re running around with ‘A Blast from the Past’ – a giant sledgehammer with grenades on each end for an explosive finale to your swings – you’ll wonder why you hadn’t started combining your weapons together sooner. While there’s the obvious incentive of having some over-the-top way to kill zombies, these weapons are often far more durable than the stuff you’ll stumble upon in the world. Now, go get creative!

Camera

Your camera may not seem like it’s going to be an important part of the game, but it’s actually one of the coolest and handiest parts of Frank’s entire arsenal at his disposal. It doesn’t have any offensive capabilities, unfortunately, but it does have a night vision mode so you can see in the dark, an analyzer to help you with your investigations, and of course, the selfie mode.

Taking just regular photos on your journey isn’t something to stick your nose up at, either. In fact, the game rewards you with PP for completing certain photography challenges, earning your skill points faster in the process. If you see a sea of zombies, or an impressive explosion happening in front of your eyes, have Frank capture it to make it worthwhile, too.

Side Missions and Collectibles

Dead Rising 4’s main campaign is spread out over seven cases including the tutorial, but there’s plenty more to see and do than simply blasting your way through the campaign. Thanks to the open-world nature of Willamette, Capcom Vancouver has been able to stuff a ton of extra content into the game. That means there are plenty of collectibles fleshing our some backstory details, blueprints for obscene weaponry, and side missions to offer another distraction to the campaign.

Pretty much all of this will lead to you earning some sort of reward. Blueprints will obviously give you access to cool new ways to cut your way through zombie hordes, collectibles offer PP to help you level up, and side missions offer even larger amounts of PP which will have you leveling up and earning skill points much much faster. If you only go from main mission to main mission, you’re really missing out a lot of the fun that’s to be had in Dead Rising 4.

Keep Your Inventory Stocked

One of the worst things to happen to you as another hundred zombies close in on your position is to suddenly find you’re down to that fancy painting you accidentally picked up as your last weapon. If you’re not well prepared and aren’t taking a look around your surroundings for things to scavenge, then it’s probably worth starting now. Always ensure that not only are your melee and ranged weapon slots all filled but that you’ve got plenty of consumable items to recover your health quickly.

All of these items are quite common around the environment, but when you’re getting carried away making your way through the endless onslaughts of zombies, it’s easy to completely lose track. Always be sure to search for supplies and better weapons, even if there doesn’t seem to be an obvious threat at the time. You’ll regret it if you don’t.