A man, a mall, and zombies…many, many zombies

If I were to say the words “Zombies” and “Video Games”, what would be the first thing that comes to mind? For the majority of us, the answer would be Resident Evil. And up until 2006, I’d agree with you. But in that year, Capcom, the makers of Resident Evil, took their zombie expertise to a new venue…a shopping mall. Thus, Dead Rising was born, a highly intuitive title that was among 2006′s best games. And with the sequel on the way, should you pick up this game if you haven’t already?

Before I start this review, I should be clear on two things. One, I’m not going to be too careful with spoilers as the game is three years old. And two, this is the review of the Xbox 360 version of the game, not the Wii version. However, the only real difference between the two is that the Wii version has many less zombies and crappier graphics, but it does have motion controls. Anyway, back to the review.

Dead Rising’s story places you in the role of photojournalist Frank West; a man looking for his next big scoop in the small town of Willamette, Colorado, where he hears something is going down. Upon arriving there in a helicopter, the government quarantine causes Frank to make an emergency landing on top of the Willamette Mall, which is absolutely massive. He then has 72 hours to get his story and make it back to the helipad on top of the mall for extraction. Once entering the mall however, Frank discovers the reason for the government quarantine, zombies. Thus, the rest of the story has Frank trying to stay alive in a zombie infested mall and figure out the reason for the zombie outbreak.

The plot is actually a lot better than it might appear at the onset. While it may appear simple enough at first, Dead Rising’s story eventually becomes ripe with twists, conspiracy, and a level of intrigue that places the events into an almost rational setting. Complete with good voice acting from a great cast of characters, Dead Rising’s story definitely stands out as one of its best aspects.

Speaking of setting though, Dead Rising’s setting is not only unique, but also one of its strong points. The Willamette Mall is not your average mall. You know that big mall in Toronto? Picture something like that. The mall has several plazas for shopping, a food court, and an underground network of maintenance tunnels to round out a relatively large space for you to play around in. There are certain gameplay aspect that make the mall so much better that I’ll discuss later but for right now, I’ll say that the design of the mall and the uniqueness of the setting help give Dead Rising a special edge.

However, Dead Rising’s greatest strengths, and weaknesses for that matter, are its gameplay. Obviously, a zombie game isn’t a zombie game if your not killing zombies and Dead Rising does that gloriously, with great blood and decapitation effects. But it’s not even that you can kill zombies, it’s how you kill them. For instance, have you ever wanted to beat down hordes of the undead with a giant teddy bear? Yes, you read that right, a giant teddy bear. Well, you can. Up for a more violent approach? Feel free to drive a lawnmower through a crowd of zombies, or an excavator (as it’s called in the game), through the back of a zombie and spin them around in a circle of destruction. Shoving a showerhead through the skull of a zombie and also works, which gives new meaning to the Slayer song “Raining Blood”. Anyway, you’re probably asking yourself by now “What the hell is he talking about?” Well, unlike other zombie titles, you aren’t restricted in your selection of weaponry. Anything and everything in the mall can be used as a weapon to fight off the zombie hordes. This includes some more effective killing tools, such as a katana from an antique shop, to more humorous selections, such as a Mega Buster that shoots tennis balls (you can actually get the real Mega Buster too but I’ll get to that later). The ability to pick and choose whatever weapon you want from an almost endless selection of weaponry in the mall really is the highlight of the game and gives it its personality. It’s a unique concept and one that works exceptionally.

Dead Rising also has its share of garden-variety firearms, including pistols, machine guns, snipers, nail guns, and of course, the shotgun. The guns are effective but they provide the low point of Dead Rising, tank controls. For those who don’t know what those are, it basically means that you can’t run and shoot while aiming at the same time. It’s a staple of other Capcom franchises like Resident Evil but even recently, it has been criticized and its use in Dead Rising is no exception. With hundreds of zombies swarming around you, it’s often infuriating to have to stand still to aim my gun at a zombie’s head. Now if I don’t want to aim, I can run and gun all I want but that can be horribly inaccurate. Worse, it takes up shots from your gun, of which you only have so many. Now I’ll give Dead Rising that once you acquire the Mega Buster, this (like much else in the game) isn’t a problem anymore. In addition, you can always use a powerful melee weapon, such as the chainsaw, the trade-off being that its condition deteriorated over time until it eventually breaks, but it’s a fair trade-off. However, the fact that such an unfortunate control scheme is attached to the guns gives little reason to use them.

If only Servebot were this tall in Marvel vs. Capcom 2

Moving off the weapons though, Dead Rising has quite a few more gameplay aspects. Firstly, this is a timed game; you only have 72 hours to complete the entire story (that’s the in-game hours, the real time is about six hours as each in-game hours lasts about five minutes of real time). However, this is plenty more than enough time to complete the story. You also get pieces of the story as missions, and you only have so much time to get from where one mission ends and another one starts. If you stick to the story though, this is also plenty of time, which some flexibility as well. The thing about Dead Rising though is its massive replayability value. You see, the story isn’t all you can do in those 72 hours. In fact, while you will always have 72 hours, you can just completely ignore the story if you want. Instead, you can go off and do missions. These involve rescuing at least one of the 50 or so other survivors of the zombie outbreak in the mall. Sometimes, you’ll just have to escort them to a safe spot but some of the time; you’ll first have to defeat a psychopath holding them hostage. These boss battles against the psychos are quite varied and include such crazies as a cult leader, a deranged gun-shop owner, and a clown…a chainsaw-wielding clown. The battles are all well executed and the survivors can generally fend for themselves…they may hurt you accidentally though. And some of them are pretty brainless and won’t move unless you command them sometimes (although you can command them). Despite some of these survivor-escorting issues though, it definitely adds a great sense of options to the game. This is addition to completing a variety of tasks on the achievements list, many of which result in in-game rewards. While some of these rewards are costumes (did I mention you can change your clothes from various vendors around the mall?), others can be exceptionally useful, such as the aforementioned Mega Buster. Tasks like these further extend Dead Rising’s replayability.

Let's just say that this clown doesn't meet the most...cleanly of endings

What also extends Dead Rising’s replayability is its leveling system. Saving survivors, defeating psychopaths, killing zombies, and even taking pictures (yes, there is a photojournalist part of the gameplay and no, it’s largely unused) allow Frank to acquire PP (the game’s term for XP). Once you acquire enough PP, you level up. Leveling up allows one of several things to happen: Your health bar becomes larger, you can carry more stuff, you can move faster, or you learn a new move, such as the jump kick or zombie walk. Now while you can’t pick what you acquire each level, it’s balanced enough that at one level, you’ll get more health, the next level will yield you more carry space, and the next will give you a new move, and then the cycle repeats. As there are 50 levels, you won’t get a speed upgrade every level, as there are only three. However, considering how slowly and goofily Frank runs at the beginning of the game, you will definitely notice how much faster, more durable, and overall what a better zombie killer Frank is near its end. But with only 72 in-game hours, how is one to level themselves all the way up to level 50?That is where Dead Rising’s most ingenious system kicks in, save status and quit. Any time you die or want to start a new game, you can. The added bonus of this feature though, is that you can start it with all your stats intact. Therefore, you can take that level 20 character you’ve worked on, start the game over with him, and work your way up to a level 50 badass. It’s one of the best systems in a video game and it helps to compensate for Dead Rising’s horrendous save system, which relies on the archaic “Save Point System”.

Finally, Dead Rising’s replayability also shows itself in two other modes, overtime mode and infinity mode. Overtime mode is extension of the main story that begins if you get the right ending out of several. It’s much shorter (it only lasts 24 hours of in-game time or two hours real time), but it’s just as engaging as the rest of the story. Infinity mode is the really replayable mode here, which tasks you with surviving in the mall as long as you can. There are no survivors as everyone is trying to kill you, all the psychopaths are loose, and your health bar is constantly dwindling, which means you must kill humans and scour the mall to find food to keep yourself alive. It’s a real challenge for those that have maxed out there characters and, speaking from personal experience, there are few instances in gaming as time-consuming and then infuriating as starting infinity mode, leaving your Xbox on overnight, and then, 15 seconds from getting the 5 Day Survivor achievement (which is 10 hours in real time and yields and sword from Mega Man), getting a disc read error. I almost snapped my disc (the key word being almost), but it’s a testament to the thrill of this mode. But as you can see, there is so much to do in Dead Rising that it’s hard for this game to get old (unless you accidentally delete your character data…Dead Rising didn’t like me much I guess).

The final aspect of the game, the presentation, is another big problem for Dead Rising. I’m not talking about the graphics firstly, in fact the game looks great and the voice acting is well done. I’m talking about the subtitles. Now for those of you who have HDTVs like me, this isn’t a problem. However, when I first got Dead Rising, I wasn’t aware that my TV had an HD option, so I spent my first play through of the game in SD. Now when there is a cutscene and thus, voice acting, this isn’t a problem. But when there is no cutscene and someone is talking, subtitles are the only thing used. Now I know what your thinking, “How can you screw up subtitles?” Well, it’s actually pretty easy. You take a game probably built for HD, make it playable in SD, and shrink the words in the subtitles in SD to the point that they are so small, they’re almost impossible to read. It’s pretty infuriating to not know what’s going on a lot of the time because you can’t read what anybody is saying. There may be a patch out now that fixes this but all I know is that from the second I realized my TV supported HD, I stuck with it and boy, did it make the game better. So basically, the graphics are good, the voice acting is good, and the subtitle-system works well…in HD.

Dead Rising is one of those games that, had it not been for the fact that I deleted my character data and my game froze during infinity mode (which infuriated me to hell), I would probably still be playing. In fact, I might even be playing it as much as the two video game series I’m most obsessed with, Fallout and Civilization and trust me, that’s a stretch. Between its great story, unique setting, unique gameplay, and nearly endless replayability value, Dead Rising is one of those games that takes a much-used concept and turns it into something different that’s as excellent as it is fun. Given there are some issues with shooting, subtitles, and the save system (ooh, alliteration), but everything else works exceptionally. The sequel, Dead Rising 2, is on its way shortly and is shaping up to eclipse its predecessor. However, it appears to not be necessary to play the first game in order to understand the second one, as the story takes place in Vegas and features a new protagonist. However, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t play the original Dead Rising, in fact you should without a doubt if you haven’t. It looks as though Resident Evil has some competition in the zombie field (but not really since both are made by Capcom). Nevertheless, Dead Rising is not only one of 2006′s best games; it is one of the best gaming experiences of this gaming era.

+ A great story, unique setting and gameplay, loads of replayability

- Tank controls for shooting, the crappy SD subtitles, and the archaic save system

9.5

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