Dead Rising

The Description

Dead Rising is an action/adventure game brought to us by CAPCOM. The game is about a survivor(Frank West) who is a freelance reporter and decides it would be a good idea to investigate the local zombie infestation at the town mall. As you may have guessed, things go wrong. Frank gets trapped within the mall and has to survive for several hours before a helicopter comes and picks him up and takes him to safety. There is a little bit more story to be had here, but not much.

The Review

-- GamePlay --
Where Dead Rising fails to catch my eye is gameplay, mostly. The gameplay is just enough to keep you entertained for 3-6 hours. But only because there is nothing like walking through a shopping mall and picking up just about anything you can find and attacking zombies with it. Some various weapons you can use include golf clubs, bats, frisbees, toy swords, and hundereds of other random(and sometimes hilarious) items. Unfortunately, this is about as far as the good for gameplay goes. What is left is a last generation shoot-while-not-moving mechanic that is similar to that of RE4. This can become pretty annoying, because a big chunk of the weapons require that you shoot/throw them and all of the zombies have a melee grab/bite.

My next complaint is that this game is virtually unplayable from a story perspective to people who don't yet own an HDTV. The game it built exclusively for HDTV's, and because of this it becomes nearly impossible to read the text in the game on an SDTV without squinting really hard for several minutes. This can be a chore especially when half the text you are reading is pointless chit-chat that the game doesn't benefit from.

There is also a problem with the game being all over the boards in terms of challenge. You can walk through thousands of zombies without a scratch, but god forbid you walk into a boss battle with a single human, because you won't survive long. These boss battles are especially annoying because some of them are only accessible at certain times of day..and if you accidently walk into one of these battles without being a high enough level character, you won't survive more then a few seconds. Even the first boss you have to fight is a challenge.

All of this mixed with the annoying cellphone type thing that won't stop beeping(and you can't turn this off in the options), terrible AI,  and a terrible save system will probably keep you from coming back to this game after your first sitting.

-- Presentation --
Dead Rising was an earlier game for the xbox360, so it's hard to critisize the presentation. Especially considering that they still hold up to todays standards. The game looks pretty good, but what really stands out is the amazing numbers of zombies that can be drawn on the screen without a single framerate hitch. I am gotten well over 300 zombies onto one screen, and still had no noticeable slowdown. This is probably where the game shines the most.

-- Conclusion --
Dead Rising is overhyped to a dramatic extent, and with lack of multiplayer i hope that nobody spent more then 30 dollars on this game. It may entertain you a bit at first, but it dies out quickly. This game is barely worth a rent, 1.5/5.