Dead Rising 3: Operation Broken Eagle - The Review

If you don’t like Top Gear or basketball, chances are that you thought Dead Rising 3 was the Xbox One’s best launch game. Despite a few technical niggles it remains an absolute riot and is certainly a game that we’d recommend to everyone – which everyone apparently agrees with, since it shifted over a million copies in just a month – so we were pretty dang excited about the quartet of DLC planned for 2014. Sadly, though, we’re pretty dang disappointed with everything about this first installment.

Operation Broken Eagle is the first of four slices of downloadable content know as Untold Stories of Los Perdidos – four standalone stories featuring a new protagonist (or, in this case, antagonist), weapons and vehicles, with events that intertwine with the main game as seen through the eyes of Nick Ramos. You even get to take the new weapons and vehicles back into the main game with you afterwards. All sounds pretty cool – until you realize that it took longer to download the 13Gb “patch” than it did to complete this first piece of DLC.

That’s the first of many major problems with Operation Broken Eagle: it’s short. Like, really short. You’ll easily blaze through it in an hour – two hours tops if you’re one of those go everywhere, see everything types (like us), and even that’s a stretch. Not that the quality of a game is measured by its length, but come on now – eight quid will get you one of the previous Dead Rising games from CEX. Sure they won’t actually work on your Xbox One, but you get the point – you expect a whole lot more than (let’s be generous) two hours from a chunk of DLC that costs eight clams.

It’s not even like this is a fascinatingly written or experimental piece of two-hour DLC like BioShock Infinite: Burial at Sea. Instead, what could have been a cracking central premise – a spec ops commander who has to rescue (or, rather, kidnap) the President, Escape from New York style – is wasted on repetitious rote tasks and a fest of fetch-quests. In fairness you’ve already had enough of it after an hour, so stretching it out any longer would only make you feel even more numb – though that would be better than feeling slapped in the face at how insubstantial it all is.

So, you’re crack bad guy commando Adam Kane and you’re here to kidnap the President. In a game like Dead Rising you’d expect that to be an entrée to DLC at its daftest, but the whole affair is tragically lacking the slapstick and silliness that the series is known for. Kane is the archetypical gruff, greyscale, clichéd military hardman that you’ve seen and not cared about in a hundred dreary Gears of War knockoffs. He’s just so damned uninteresting and unlikable and, most importantly, no bloody fun to play.

Much like his miserable missions, which feature such enthralling go here, do that objectives as rescuing teammates who are still alive, killing teammates who are zombified and retrieving their dog tags, rescuing teammates who are still alive, killing teammates who are zombified and retrieving their dog tags, rescuing teammates who are still alive, killing teammates who are zombified and retrieving… you get the picture. It’s dull and gets duller, fast.

Some of the tedium could have been alleviated had co-op been an option but, as with all four DLC episodes, it’s a single player-only affair. All of which really whets our appetites for the next three. Thankfully, at least the promise of new toys to play with has been fittingly fulfilled, with a nifty new vehicle and a pretty tasty raft of new weapons that will have the Predator fans among you going giddy with glee. Yes, miniguns are the order of the day.

The five new weapons included in the download feature everyone’s favorite tool of destruction, as so timelessly wielded by Jesse “The Body” Ventura and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Even cooler still, the Armadillo armored vehicle that you gain access to features a minigun mounted on top, enabling you to take “ghetto blaster” to a whole new level.

On top of that there’s also a natty new combo weapon Blueprint to add to your DIY arsenal. Still, as much fun as the weapons are, we’re still talking eight quid for an hour or so of gameplay and a handful of new toys – and that simply isn't good enough. At half the price Operation Broken Eagle wouldn't be any more substantial but it would feel a whole lot less like a rip-off. As it stands, this is one of the poorest value propositions we've ever seen offered as DLC. It makes Horse Armor look almost reasonable by comparison.

Verdict:

A Snake Plissken-inspired prequel chapter for Dead Rising 3 sounds like a great idea, but it’s bereft of any of the fun or substance that the premise promises. At an hour or so in length it’s insultingly short, while the content itself is shamefully shallow. Unless you really dig the idea of more mind-numbing “go here, fetch/kill that” missions, or you’ve been craving a minigun so desperately that you’re willing to pay eight quid for one, there’s nothing here to make the purchase worthwhile. All that Operation Broken Eagle does is sour anybody with a brain on buying the next three installments.