I just wish it rose a little higher
Dead Rising is a zombie-oriented game by Capcom, which automatically brings the Resident Evil series to mind. However the presence of zombies is the only thing these games have in common. Dead Rising is not at all scary, pure action from beginning to end, while all the Resident Evil games were designed from the ground up as horror experiences. Well, except 5 anyway. Dead Rising has an acceptable premise, satisfying gameplay, and nicely polished graphics. It's really too bad that several parts of the design cripple the game.
Dead Rising puts you in the shoes of Frank West, a freelance photographer, who receives an anonymous tip that something major is going down in the forgettable town of Willamette, Colorado. When he arrives, hoping to find the story of the century, he discovers that the town is in the middle of a full-blown zombie apocalypse, with the majority of the townsfolk transformed into ravenous undead. On a hunch, he has his helicopter pilot drop him off on the roof of the local mall, an oddly enormous facility for such a small town, and thus the game begins.
The basic idea behind the game is that Frank is searching for an explanation behind the zombie outbreak, and he has 72 in-game hours to do it in. He's doing it for the fame breaking the story will bring him, but players will be naturally curious as to what ridiculous explanation was cooked up for this particular zombie story. Spoiler: It's not the T-Virus. In reality, the story doesn't matter very much, it's just there to string you along from survivor to survivor, boss fight to boss fight. After a safehouse is set up in the security office, you're directed to various parts of the mall by the janitor, Otis, who will contact you on the infamously annoying walkie-talkie to tell you where to find living humans he sees on the security monitors. These humans take one of two types, survivors or psychopaths, which I'll elaborate on later. Missions which are not related to the main storyline are entirely optional, though helping more people will get you a better ending... although unfortunately, none of the endings can really be described as "happy". As the main story missions are completed, more and more of the mall is unlocked (literally), allowing Frank an ever-greater number of places to go and things to do.
The core gameplay revolves around fighting zombies, and is excellent. Frank can grab nearly anything he sees and use it to dispatch the zombie hordes, ranging from running them over in a stolen car, chopping off their feet with a lawnmower, or bludgeoning them to death with a giant plastic lipstick tube. Of particular interest is the antique store, which contains both katanas and battle axes, which can put down multiple zombies with a single swing. As far as fighting zombies goes, the gameplay is fantastic. The sheer variety of ways to fight the brain eaters, combined with the fact that items break and degrade as you use them, forcing you to constantly improvise, makes for great action. Pretty much my only complaint about the combat is that almost everything, especially Frank's special combat moves, seems focused around fighting individual zombies, when the game is clearly designed around crowd battles.
You may have noticed all this sounds pretty positive. You will also have noticed that I gave the game two and a half stars. The main problem with Dead Rising is that doing anything other than fighting zombies is a major pain in the ass, which unfortunately makes up the entirety of the story missions.
See, you'll never be given a mission like "Go kill 150 zombies and then come back to me." No, the zombies are just sort of 'there', chilling out all over the place and presenting more of an obstacle than an objective. Your missions are entirely divided between one of two categories: rescuing survivors ( escort missions) or fighting psychopaths ( boss fights). Survivors are annoying, but manageable. Basically, you've got to convince them to come with you, which can range from simply talking to them, to giving them an item to gain their trust, to one case where the survivors were Japanese tourists, requiring Frank to get a Japanese phrasebook from a bookstore so they could understand him. Then you've got to get them from wherever they are to the safety of the security office. Sometimes they'll follow you, sometimes you have to hold their hand to comfort them, and sometimes you literally have to carry them on your back (ironically, these are the easiest ones to manage, since they can't get lost in crowds of zombies).
Psychopaths on the other hand... they're humans who've lost their minds thanks to the zombie apocalypse, and are now taking it out on the other survivors. These are far and away the least fun part of the game. See, zombies are dead, so they can traditionally take a lot more punishment than a human being should, and it shows through in Dead Rising since if you don't aim for the head, a zombie can take a half a dozen handgun shots and still come after you. Yet the psychopath bosses have much, much more health than the zombies do, not to mention flashy, physically impossible attacks, making them far, far more dangerous than the undead cannibals who surround them. No matter how it's played, this always seems wrong somehow. Not to mention that the unusual controls make it extremely difficult to survive, much less put down, some of the bosses.
But all this is rendered irrelevant by a deliberate game design decision which stands out as the game's crown jewel of crappiness. As Frank fights zombies, rescues people, murders bosses, and takes pictures using the game's simple photography system, he earns PP. Earn a certain amount of PP, and you level up, earning one seemingly random bonus, such as another block of health on your life meter, another item slot in your inventory, or a new combat move. This is all well and good, but the game is deliberately designed so that you cannot level up fast enough to compete with the rapidly increasing difficulty, and grinding isn't really an option since there's the constantly ticking clock. Instead, Capcom took the worst page from their worst game, Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter's "Scenario Overlay" system, and forces you to restart the entire game over and over again. The idea is that you're supposed to play the game as far as you can until you get stuck ("SOL", if you will), then you hit New Game +. This resets all events, but allows you to keep your level, and all the benefits levelling up has got you so far. Then, with more health and inventory space, not to mention personal experience, it's supposed to be easier to surpass the earlier bosses this time. So you play as far as you can again, and then you reset again. Rinse and repeat until you theoretically beat the game, earning one of the universally depressing endings.
The only reason this is in any way more acceptable than it was in Dragon Quarter is because the feature seems to lend itself better to an action game than to a stat-intensive RPG. In my opinion, the Nintendo Wii version of this game, Dead Rising: Chop 'Til You Drop, is superior to the original because of all the features they had to remove in the porting, among them the time limit and the forced resets, as well as, to my amusement, the astonishingly annoying Warthog rip-off full of convicts that circles the central park in the Xbox version. Didn't I mention them? A short time after the thee days starts, three escaped prisoners in a military turret jeep show up in the central park, and they literally have nothing better to do than to chase down and murder humans trying to make their way between the various sections of the mall. Every aspect of fighting them is an exercise in aggravation; kill the guy on the turret or the driver, and the dude in the passenger seat will take their place. You have to kill all three of them before the jeep is no longer a threat. And here's the best part: Despite the game's focus on sort-of-realistic treatment of its characters (there is no restarting missions in the same 'time loop', if a survivor dies or gets zombified, they stay that way), the three assholes in the jeep respawn every time you come back to the park!
It's very strange that all of the major flaws with Dead Rising; the annoying calls from Otis, the endless escort missions, the frustrating boss battles, the strict time limit, and the terrible New Game + system, all of these flaws were deliberate choices on the part of the developers. Considering how fantastic the core gameplay of fighting zombies is, it really took a lot to suck the fun out of this game. It's just too bad they didn't stick closer to undead combat, or this game might actually have deserved a sequel, which I'm fairly certain I will never play. I say it's worth a rental, but not worth your money to buy.
Dead Rising puts you in the shoes of Frank West, a freelance photographer, who receives an anonymous tip that something major is going down in the forgettable town of Willamette, Colorado. When he arrives, hoping to find the story of the century, he discovers that the town is in the middle of a full-blown zombie apocalypse, with the majority of the townsfolk transformed into ravenous undead. On a hunch, he has his helicopter pilot drop him off on the roof of the local mall, an oddly enormous facility for such a small town, and thus the game begins.
The basic idea behind the game is that Frank is searching for an explanation behind the zombie outbreak, and he has 72 in-game hours to do it in. He's doing it for the fame breaking the story will bring him, but players will be naturally curious as to what ridiculous explanation was cooked up for this particular zombie story. Spoiler: It's not the T-Virus. In reality, the story doesn't matter very much, it's just there to string you along from survivor to survivor, boss fight to boss fight. After a safehouse is set up in the security office, you're directed to various parts of the mall by the janitor, Otis, who will contact you on the infamously annoying walkie-talkie to tell you where to find living humans he sees on the security monitors. These humans take one of two types, survivors or psychopaths, which I'll elaborate on later. Missions which are not related to the main storyline are entirely optional, though helping more people will get you a better ending... although unfortunately, none of the endings can really be described as "happy". As the main story missions are completed, more and more of the mall is unlocked (literally), allowing Frank an ever-greater number of places to go and things to do.
The core gameplay revolves around fighting zombies, and is excellent. Frank can grab nearly anything he sees and use it to dispatch the zombie hordes, ranging from running them over in a stolen car, chopping off their feet with a lawnmower, or bludgeoning them to death with a giant plastic lipstick tube. Of particular interest is the antique store, which contains both katanas and battle axes, which can put down multiple zombies with a single swing. As far as fighting zombies goes, the gameplay is fantastic. The sheer variety of ways to fight the brain eaters, combined with the fact that items break and degrade as you use them, forcing you to constantly improvise, makes for great action. Pretty much my only complaint about the combat is that almost everything, especially Frank's special combat moves, seems focused around fighting individual zombies, when the game is clearly designed around crowd battles.
You may have noticed all this sounds pretty positive. You will also have noticed that I gave the game two and a half stars. The main problem with Dead Rising is that doing anything other than fighting zombies is a major pain in the ass, which unfortunately makes up the entirety of the story missions.
See, you'll never be given a mission like "Go kill 150 zombies and then come back to me." No, the zombies are just sort of 'there', chilling out all over the place and presenting more of an obstacle than an objective. Your missions are entirely divided between one of two categories: rescuing survivors ( escort missions) or fighting psychopaths ( boss fights). Survivors are annoying, but manageable. Basically, you've got to convince them to come with you, which can range from simply talking to them, to giving them an item to gain their trust, to one case where the survivors were Japanese tourists, requiring Frank to get a Japanese phrasebook from a bookstore so they could understand him. Then you've got to get them from wherever they are to the safety of the security office. Sometimes they'll follow you, sometimes you have to hold their hand to comfort them, and sometimes you literally have to carry them on your back (ironically, these are the easiest ones to manage, since they can't get lost in crowds of zombies).
Psychopaths on the other hand... they're humans who've lost their minds thanks to the zombie apocalypse, and are now taking it out on the other survivors. These are far and away the least fun part of the game. See, zombies are dead, so they can traditionally take a lot more punishment than a human being should, and it shows through in Dead Rising since if you don't aim for the head, a zombie can take a half a dozen handgun shots and still come after you. Yet the psychopath bosses have much, much more health than the zombies do, not to mention flashy, physically impossible attacks, making them far, far more dangerous than the undead cannibals who surround them. No matter how it's played, this always seems wrong somehow. Not to mention that the unusual controls make it extremely difficult to survive, much less put down, some of the bosses.
But all this is rendered irrelevant by a deliberate game design decision which stands out as the game's crown jewel of crappiness. As Frank fights zombies, rescues people, murders bosses, and takes pictures using the game's simple photography system, he earns PP. Earn a certain amount of PP, and you level up, earning one seemingly random bonus, such as another block of health on your life meter, another item slot in your inventory, or a new combat move. This is all well and good, but the game is deliberately designed so that you cannot level up fast enough to compete with the rapidly increasing difficulty, and grinding isn't really an option since there's the constantly ticking clock. Instead, Capcom took the worst page from their worst game, Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter's "Scenario Overlay" system, and forces you to restart the entire game over and over again. The idea is that you're supposed to play the game as far as you can until you get stuck ("SOL", if you will), then you hit New Game +. This resets all events, but allows you to keep your level, and all the benefits levelling up has got you so far. Then, with more health and inventory space, not to mention personal experience, it's supposed to be easier to surpass the earlier bosses this time. So you play as far as you can again, and then you reset again. Rinse and repeat until you theoretically beat the game, earning one of the universally depressing endings.
The only reason this is in any way more acceptable than it was in Dragon Quarter is because the feature seems to lend itself better to an action game than to a stat-intensive RPG. In my opinion, the Nintendo Wii version of this game, Dead Rising: Chop 'Til You Drop, is superior to the original because of all the features they had to remove in the porting, among them the time limit and the forced resets, as well as, to my amusement, the astonishingly annoying Warthog rip-off full of convicts that circles the central park in the Xbox version. Didn't I mention them? A short time after the thee days starts, three escaped prisoners in a military turret jeep show up in the central park, and they literally have nothing better to do than to chase down and murder humans trying to make their way between the various sections of the mall. Every aspect of fighting them is an exercise in aggravation; kill the guy on the turret or the driver, and the dude in the passenger seat will take their place. You have to kill all three of them before the jeep is no longer a threat. And here's the best part: Despite the game's focus on sort-of-realistic treatment of its characters (there is no restarting missions in the same 'time loop', if a survivor dies or gets zombified, they stay that way), the three assholes in the jeep respawn every time you come back to the park!
It's very strange that all of the major flaws with Dead Rising; the annoying calls from Otis, the endless escort missions, the frustrating boss battles, the strict time limit, and the terrible New Game + system, all of these flaws were deliberate choices on the part of the developers. Considering how fantastic the core gameplay of fighting zombies is, it really took a lot to suck the fun out of this game. It's just too bad they didn't stick closer to undead combat, or this game might actually have deserved a sequel, which I'm fairly certain I will never play. I say it's worth a rental, but not worth your money to buy.
1 Comments