Dead Rising Review (360)

Age Rating: 18 (BBFC)

What is it?

You, evil zombies, a photographer named Frank, and a mall full of wonderful toys.

Is it fun?

Oh yes. Brilliant game, if you like a bit of zombie violence.

Is it worth £39.99?
Yes.

Normally I’d say no on principle. You can get a lot of good stuff for forty quid but in this case there’s enough replayability to justify the price tag.

Why?

Run around a mall killing zombies with everything that comes to hand. Kill a wide variety of psychopaths. Save some hapless victims on the way. Sound like fun?

Damn right.

Dead Rising is a great game. Highlights include watching zombies stagger around with traffic cones on their heads, facing off against a maniac clown and walking on the shoulders of zombies. It has well-known flaws but if you’re lucky enough to access a big HD screen then Dead Rising is bloody fantastic. Provided you get the hang of its freaky-ass save system, that is.

This needs a bit of background so: In Dead Rising there are two ways to play the game. You can go for the Truth, follow the story arc and investigate just what happened to Wilamette Parkview Mall… or you can run around for hours hitting zombies with baseball bats and saving all the survivors. If you want to do the former you need to do the casefile tasks before their timers run out. If you want save people, you have a walkie-talkie that will bleep to tell you about new survivors.

Here’s the crucial bit they left out of the manual: You CANNOT DO BOTH in a single play-through.

Dead Rising limits you to one gameplay save slot. If you’re trying to find the ‘True Ending’ it’s easy to get caught up in a survivor-scenario because the walkie-talkie is almost impossible to ignore. It bleeps constantly and the temptation is so strong to pick up a survivor that happens to be on the way to your destination. Don’t give in to it!

The single save slot means that it’s very, very easy to save the game only to find out that you haven’t enough time left to complete the next phase of the story arc. Once you’ve missed a deadline, the truth is gone and it ain’t coming back. No problem, if you’re near the beginning. Bloody outrageous if you’re halfway through the game. If you want to know the truth you’re just gonna have to play through all those case files again.

Everyone I know has been forced to kill Carlito in the food court at least three times due to this particular design feature. It’s stupidly frustrating.

All that aside, once you realise (or admit) that you can’t solve the case files and save all the survivors in the same game, the save system works very well. You can’t create multiple save files all over the place so the sense of loss when you fail to rescue a survivor is all the more palpable. When you do die, you can save your character’s state and start from the beginning with all the skills and strength that you gained previously, so it doesn’t feel like a complete waste of time.

If the thought of zombie lawn-mowing, zombie-pin bowling and zombie hedge clippers is amusing to you then buy this game. But get a HD television first.

Links:
Official Capcom Dead Rising site

Screenshots:

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