by:	January 15, 2008

Remember shortly after the PS2 launched, there was a big 3D brawler that gamers were looking forward to? It looked great, had awesome graphics and was just generally a really anticipated title. If you don't know what game I'm talking about, it's Squaresoft's The Bouncer. That title turned out to be a huge dissapointment. Despite delivering pretty visuals and some fun, short length and repetitive action did that title in. I feared the same would happen with Dead Rising. Capcom's first retail title for the 360, the screens were impressive but things looked like they might get a little bit repetitive and a game like this had to be short, right? Well, Dead Rising defies the odds. This is probably the first truly great 3D brawler to be released on any system. There are some serious design flaws which keep this game from being the truly amazing game that it could of been, but the core gameplay is so much fun that Dead Rising shines despite its flaws.

You play through Dead Rising as Frank West, a photojournalist, something he's constantly reminding others of. He gets a scoop that something big is going down in the little town of Willamette, so he decides to investigate. As he says, he hasn't made a career out of waiting for the news to tell him what to cover, so he hires a helicopter and heads for the small town. When he gets close, he sees a military blockade, people being attacked by what he assumes to be a mob, and all kinds of horror unfolding on the ground below. Seeing a large group attacking a mall, he gets dropped off there and tells his pilot to come back for him in three days, which is the set up for the game's main mode, 72 hour mode, in which you have three game days to get your story and get out. The story is a mixture of cool characters, comedy and horror. Everything is a bit campy by design. Dead Rising is not a game which takes itself too seriously - the constant jokes at the expense of the horror genre in a situation where the characters are taking things extremely seriously makes for some great laughs.



The gameplay of Dead Rising is its biggest problem. The weird thing is
that the core gameplay is incredibly fun and well done. The mall is
filled with hundreds of items you can use to kill zombies and trying
each of them out is a lot of the fun of the game. Whacking a zombie to
death with a purse is awesome, so is going nuts with an uzi, or
blasting a zombie with an electric guitar. Killing zombies really
doesn't get old, which is why it would have been nice to have a free
roam mode. Just being able to run around killing zombies forever would
have been great. You sort of get that in Infinity mode but your
constantly declining health hurts that mode.



Where Dead Rising starts to have problems is when you try to actually
play the game's core story missions. The game is set up in an extremely
linear fashion and requires exact precision. While it would have been
cool to search the mall for clues to the scoop and actually play
journalist, Capcom decided to make you discover things out by playing a
certain set of missions which must start at exact times in the game's
72 hour clock. If you're late, you will lose the scoop entirely. You
can just reload your last save but if you save somewhere where you
don't have time to make it, you're in trouble. This is because Capcom
decided to give you only one save file per storage device. So unless
you happen to have a memory card, that's one save. Sure it adds
challenge and replay, but at the cost of functionality. This is why
Dead Rising is one of the few games in awhile to feature the equivalent
of New Game +. Basically, you have the option of restarting the game at
any time with all of your stats and moves, as well as your current
outfit. Restarting can be fun as you'll move through the game much
quicker and have more time to have fun and complete escort missions to
save people, but bone headed survivor AI brings even that down.




Graphically, Dead Rising looks really nice. The main characters are
really well animated and the mall looks nice. The character models
other than the main ones are not nearly as impressive but the actual
polygon count isn't what makes this game look so impressive anyway.
Instead it's the number of characters they managed to get on screen at
once. Seeing hundreds of zombies sprawled out in front of you is
awesome, especially when you wade in and start killing them, having the
really well done blood splatter all over your clothes... it's a blast.
Some might not like the frequent load times, but they managed to do all
of this while at least keeping the load times short and you'll never
see really long load times even if you do see them fairly frequently.

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Dead Rising has the best sound design on the 360. Every single weapon has a unique and perfect sound for it. The sound of the blood splatter, the sound of the zombies falling down, it's all pretty much perfect. Extremely impressive. I also enjoyed the voice acting in the game a great deal, as it had a sort of camp appeal to it without being bad. The voice actors knew exactly how to play this script for maximum effect and to fit this game well. I absolutely loved it.

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