Dead Rising Reviewed

It's been a while since I did an actual game review that I couldn't sum up in 2 or 3 sentences, so I'm going to lay the smack down on Capcom's newest gem for the 360: DEAD RISING.

The Setup: Dead Rising is a game where you play a cutting edge photojournalist named Frank. Frank gets dropped off at a shopping mall in Colorado in hopes of uncovering the truth behind an outbreak of zombie infestation in the area. The mall of course if jam packed with zombies to kill, psychopathic humans (boss fights) and survivors that need rescuing.

The Game: Frank has the entire mall at his disposal. He can change clothes, use almost anything as a weapon, pick up foods for health, slay unlimited hoardes of zombies and unlock new areas of the mall by beating the bosses in each area. He can also take photos for easy XP that he uses to learn more fighting skills, do more dmg, get additional inventory slots, etc. The story pushes the gameplay in a series of time-sensitive missions and case files to uncover. This keeps the kill counts up while pushing the story forward. Stopping to kill everything around you is impossible if you're trying to do missions, therefore the gameplay consists of running and dodging like a hyper football quarterback through endless mobs of zombie crowds.

Enemy Smarts: The AI of the zombies is incredibly realistic. They're not too smart but they know how to use their numbers against their victims by surrounding, pinning and sometimes chasing them down. If they're facing you as you run up on them, expect them to reach out and try to grab you, bite you, or pull you down for some serious brain munching if you're not careful. Each zombie moves, reacts and is dressed differently than the next. Some are more aggressive than others, some are faster than others, some wander aimlessly into walls and off scafolding, many will attack you with a weapon and then drop it after you kick them in the face.

The Graphics: Dead Rising utilizes the power of the 360 perfectly. You can literally see hundreds of individually animated zombies on screen at once. The environment of the mall is rendered perfectly and the transitions between day and night are outstanding (zombies get much more aggresive and dangerous at night and when the lights go out, you can see the red eyes glowing). From the thick coat of wax on the supermarket floor to the blood splatter on Frank's white shirt, this game lets no detail go unrendered.

The Bad: I really love this game, but the complaints I have are major enough to keep this good game from being great. First of all, the save feature is ridiculous. You can only save at given locations (bathrooms and the storeroom) and saving is done manually, so if you can't make it across the courtyard, through the plaza, up the stairs after rescuing 5 survivors with one health bar left and you die right as you're unbuckling your pants at the urinal, too bad. You just lost an hour of your life and gameplay that you can never get back. Oh and you're going to have to go back and kill that boss again too.

Another issue I have is that you're expected to run far too many errands/quests/rescues in a very limited amount of time, therefore you constantly feel rushed while playing this game, especially in the 72 Hour Mode. Unless you want to cheat your way through by following the strategy guide step-by-step, there's just no way to get everyone out the mall, kill every boss and still manage to solve the case files in the time given. It's a shame to have such an awesome playground to kill the undead, locate hidden weapon spawns, experiment with different food recipes and not have any time to do anything because you're rushing from case to case. I suppose this is what makes unlocking the Unlimited Play Mode more fun. If you bomb the major cases, you're done and must load your last save point.

My third and final complaint is related to aiming controls. Any time you pull a firearm out, you have to go into aim mode if you want to hit anything. Unfortunately you can't run while in aim mode and your crosshair defaults to center pitch each time you go into aim mode. That is to say that if you're aiming at one of the several bosses who jump around awnings, rafters and high shelves (amazing how almost every boss loves to take the high ground and shoot/throw things at you) but you release the aim mode trigger so you can run to avoid a bomb, gunfire, a creeping zombie, etc. and you then pull the trigger to get in aim mode again, no matter where your camera is looking, your aim defaults to center so you have to manually move your aim pitch back up again. This may not sound like a big deal, but having to readjust your pitch every time you move and take aim makes the boss fights in this game more infuriating than fighting bosses in Kameo.

The game is great, bloody fun overall. Despite my critical gripes, I can't wait to unlock the Unlimited Play Mode so I can spend some time unlocking achievements, running around finding good weapons, and killing hoardes of undead. The game has six different endings, so the replayability is pretty decent, especially if most of your survivors die the first time through like mine did.