That's what you spend most of the game doing, in fact, and it's dumb fun. 'Masses' is right, too, because there are often hundreds of zombies on-screen, and with vehicles dotted around to speed your progress through the large city, you cut through thousands a day. Nick would be an awkward star of a third-person shooter, but his lumbering movement and strange jumping behaviour are more acceptable when you're carving a path through masses of zombies in an open-world brawler, where the game's performance and detail levels also matter less. You never escape Dead Rising 3's technical shortcomings, particularly the slowdown, but once you make it out of this freeway tunnel and into Los Perdidos proper, at least you do stop worrying about them. Levelling up gives you points that you can spend on upgrading attributes or unlocking bundles of blueprints.
You still earn Prestige Points (PP) for everything. The controller lag is jarring as you wrestle Nick around, fumbling to pick up desired objects in a swarm of competing contextual prompts, bashing zombies with whatever you can.
Slipping into the mechanic's overalls of Nick Ramos, players are dumped in a dingy tunnel full of boxy cars, rigid cloth tents and dodgy textures. The first minutes of the game are some of its worst, as pixels crawl along the jagged edges of road signs while canned shots of the surroundings strain to set the scene against the weight of slowdown. It's not though it's an Xbox One launch title, although it may be a while before you believe that.
Grand Theft Auto 5, with its astonishing attention to detail and beautiful art direction, makes Dead Rising 3 look like it's struggling with the limitations of ageing hardware. Not because Los Perdidos is poorly put together - split into four districts linked by freeways, it's host to plenty of interesting locations - but because it's impossible not to compare it to the other game we played this year that took on the City of Angels. Dead Rising 3 takes place in the city of Los Perdidos, a very loose rendering of Los Angeles in California, and Capcom Vancouver may live to regret that choice.