Hands-On With Dead Rising: Chop Til' You Drop

Considering the workout that Dead Rising gave the Xbox 360, as well as the game's relative levels of difficulty and complexity, it seems like an odd choice to bring Capcom's vivid zombie mall simulator to the Wii. Then again, Capcom saw a good amount of success in bringing Resident Evil 4 to the Wii, so perhaps there's a good market for zombie action games on the platform. Capcom allowed press some hands-on time with a brief demo of Dead Rising: Chop Til' You Drop at Nintendo's recent media summit, and while a few new features have been introduced, it's the stuff that's been trimmed that left a greater impression on me.

It's been apparent from the early screenshots that the graphical detail, as well as the number of zombies, had to be rolled back significantly to make Dead Rising work on the Wii hardware, which held true with the demo being given. Expect jaggier edges and blurrier textures, but the functional impact of this necessity is a greatly reduced sense of urgency. A huge part of what made Dead Rising so terrifying was the constant threat of being overwhelmed by a vast horde of brain-crazy corpses, something that seemed absent in the demo.

Those who played the original Dead Rising are probably still dealing with the pangs of guilt over the characters that died due to the game's real-time format. Partly as an acknowledgement to the more casual market on the Wii, and partly as a response to player feedback, Capcom has streamlined the structure of Dead Rising: Chop Til' You Drop to reduce the number of side missions and include much of that content in the game's main story. While perhaps not as interesting in format as the original, perhaps now I can play Dead Rising without having an anxiety attack. Another core component of Dead Rising was its photography system, which rewarded you for breaking out your camera in the middle of the chaos and taking some intense, well-timed pictures. This has been removed from Chop Til' You Drop entirely. Additionally, Capcom declined comment when asked about the size of the relative game world.

So what's new in Chop Til' You Drop? Beyond some pesky zombie poodles, and the ability to send a zombie flying by shaking the Wii remote when armed with a baseball bat, not much so far. The basic controls seemed to work well enough on the Wii. You can perform melee attacks by swinging the Wii remote or simply hammering on the A button, and firearm controls are the same as they were in Resident Evil 4 for the Wii, requiring you to go into an aiming mode where the analog stick controls your camera view and the Wii remote for aiming.

While the excluded features in Chop Til' You Drop don't seem to be doing the game any favors at the moment, they don't have to be detrimental. Some faster pacing and more exaggerated action could still make for a pretty entertaining arcade-style action game, though either way, this is shaping up to be a pretty different experience from the original.