xBox 360 Game Review: Dead Rising - Capcom know their zombies. If you're a Resident Evil fan, you may think you know Capcom's zombies, in which case Dead Rising is going to come as a surprise. This is zombie high camp, played for laughs not chills. It's played just right too, and aside from one major technical niggle, this is a game that's all about fun.
Dead Rising rapidly drops your character, photojournalist Frank West, in the middle of the zombie's natural environment, the suburban mega-mall. Nearly everything in the mall is available for use in vanquishing hordes of zombies, and when you're tired of the obvious, like literally mowing them down, you can take a break from guns, sports equipment, and gardening tools, and challenge your creativity. Just how much damage can you do with a couple of gallons of cooking oil and a carnie mask?
There are hordes, too. Dead Rising's zombies aren't fast or even overly aggressive, but there sure are a heck of a lot of them. Mobs run into the hundreds, meaning there are times when the game can be a total gore-fest. Largely, the Xbox 360 copes with this without a hitch. It's not all about undead slicing and dicing, though. Dead Rising has a plot. Frank's job isn't to kill zombies, it's to find out what happened in sleepy Willamette to make everyone so cranky and cannibalistic. Using a Case File system, Frank follows clues through his main mission, given seventy-two hours to uncover the mystery.
This makes for compelling play. It's also a total pain in the behind. Following the Case Files often means being in a particular place at a certain time. Miss the deadline and the mission is over - each Case File follows on from the one before it. It's a rare game mechanic people might recognise from Roman mystery game SPQR.
Unfortunately, Dead Rising only lets you save at designated save points, and then it only lets you have one saved game. If you miss an appointment and your last save isn't far enough back, you're screwed. Your only real option is to start all over again.
You can choose to do this with your upgraded version of Frank, though. He gains prestige points through killing zombies, taking photos, completing missions etc, which you can use to increase his abilities. You can also learn new skills by reading books, and regain health points and get temporary 'power ups' by experimenting with mixing the food you find around the mall. And pointless but fun, you can dress Frank in any of the clothes you find in the stores, in case you ever wanted to know what it was like to beat a zombie to death with a frying pan while dressed in a miniskirt and heels.
Most of the missions come down to escort duty: rescuing survivors and taking them back to the safe base in the mall's security office. Mixed in with that, though, are several survivors who've gone psychotic with the strain. These act as 'boss fights' for Frank, and are much more challenging than most zombie fights. You'll get offered a number of side-missions, too, which you can't possibly get through in the seventy-two hour mode and still catch all the Case File deadlines. You are going to have to play this more than once, and while there's some frustration in the deadline system, both the plot structure and the amount of game content make that a lot less painful. Even if you played through perfectly first time, you'd have missed so much on the side that you'd want to go back again anyway.
Dead Rising isn't the top end of Xbox 360 games graphically, but it's perfectly good enough and hardly ever chugs dealing with some very crowded screens. The sound, though, is particularly great. Loving attention has been put into ensuring that every single thing you hit a zombie with sounds just like you think it should, whether that be an oversized stuffed teddy bear or a musical instrument.
It's a real pity that the save system makes the Case File system such a frustrating pain, because otherwise Dead Rising is a great, fun game which manages to be both compelling and packed with intestine-spattered laughs.
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