Dead Rising 3: Operation Broken Eagle review

Operation Broken Eagle might just be the laziest, most pointless DLC I’ve ever played.

Everything about it feels less like an official expansion to Dead Rising 3 and more like a fan-made mod produced on a shoestring budget and a limited deadline. It offers no boss fights, no new missions types, and only two real cutscenes—one to kick things off and another to wrap it all up at the end. In between, you’ll just be rolling through missions that nearly universally boil down to going somewhere and killing some enemies. There’s absolutely none of the creativity, variety, or personality of the main campaign.

For the duration of this insubstantial two-hour ride, you play as a military errand boy named Adam Kane—a character so forgettable I had to look up his name twice while writing this sentence—who’s looking to secure the President for your boss’ nefarious so-and-sos. The story attempts something cute by making you directly responsible for some of the goings-on in Los Perdidos that Nick Ramos encountered in the main campaign, but they’re all fairly unremarkable mysteries that didn’t warrant solving in the first place. It’s like a DLC for BioShock Infinite that puts you in the shoes of the guy who installed the curtains in Elizabeth’s tower. Not exactly earth-shattering, Lost-ian serendipities, there.

In addition, this DLC includes two new collectible types—obvious filler, really—and around a dozen sidequests, all but two of which are completely identical. You head to the marker, see a member of your squad who’s turned into a zombie, kill him, and then pick up his dog tags. Over. And over. And over. The two side missions that do mix things up slightly are even simpler: Your squaddies are still alive, so you just walk up to them and they join your party. And, hey, there’s no way to get rid of them at a safehouse like in the main game, so have fun babysitting them until you finish.

A large part of the problem is that the Broken Eagle carries over your progression from the main game. If—like me and presumably everyone else who’s been playing Dead Rising 3 since launch—you’ve already reached max level, nothing provides the remotest hint of a challenge. It’s also fairly nonsensical from a storytelling standpoint. Why would Kane have the same skillset and upgrades as Nick? Why would he be able to craft combo weapons and vehicles on the fly? Why does no one care that he’s running around shooting Secret Service agents with a dildo gun? Dead Rising has always been silly, but it’s provided just enough shallow pretense for the silliness that you had to give them points for effort. Here, you get nothing to suspend your disbelief, just a big fat “deal with it.”

Just about the only reason to shell out the 10 dollars (or 30 for a season pass of four episodes—a 25 percent discount!) is the chance to try out some new weapons and a new vehicle, then carry them back into your main game so you can mess around in the campaign and co-op. But I can’t help but feel that it would’ve made more sense to just release those as piecemeal add-ons on the cheap. While fun enough additions, they’re certainly not enough to give this side story any momentum, even with its brief running time.

In the end, the only things that are really enjoyable about playing Operation Broken Eagle are those that made the core game so much fun—slaughtering zombies in a big, wacky sandbox. And if you already own Dead Rising 3, well, you can keep doing that ad nauseam without spending a dime.