What would you do if you had a shopping mall all to yourself? We'd pretty much go mental, steal clothes, smash windows, ride bikes down the escalators, go to the toilet in the ladies' for an exciting thrill, eat free food until we're sick and start playing around with expensive power tools until we scare ourselves into stopping. What a day out that would be. This is pretty much what you can do in Dead Rising.
Yeah, there are zombies and a story about zombies and you'll be amazed at how like Dawn of the Dead it all is, but we've been having as much fun as a woman on holiday in a chocolate factory simply messing about to our heart's content in the game's incredibly realistic and versatile mall.
There are pies in the pie shops. You can pick them up and eat them for a health boost or throw them at zombies. Obviously a pie doesn't do that much damage to a zombie, but it's a laugh. Occasionally the pie will get stuck on a zombie's face, leaving it stumbling around in an even more confused state than usual. With a pie on its face. For a supposed horror game, Dead Rising is the funniest thing we've played in years. You can grab a handful of CDs and Frisbee the meatbags to death, throw books, kick footballs into the crowd, put buckets on their heads. And then there's the lawnmower. Mowing through 100 zombies is about as good as things can get.
Oh, and then you get the ice hockey stick that fires pucks into the bloody-mouthed crowd, a shopping trolley to battering-ram your way through, a skateboard for getting around quickly and even a bike. You can throw buckets of paint over them, and we also accidentally stuffed the arm of one dead zombie into the mouth of another zombie during one random fist fight.
You can even spit at them. It's pretty much impossible to kill a zombie by spit alone, unless, perhaps, you decide to spend six months spitting in a sealed room to make one drown. Why can you do this? We don't really care! The potential for humiliating the dumb, groping sad-sack brain-eaters is immense and going to be superb fun. You can and almost certainly will spend hours upon hours trying to do weird stuff like this. There's nothing about Dead Rising that doesn't look like a hell of a lot of fun.
It's not all light-hearted slapstick though. Like when you get the sledgehammer. One blow on the top of the head mushes a zombie onto its knees then into the floor. The chainsaw... you can probably guess what happens when that hits soft, rotting zombie flesh, and pretty much everything you do results in streams of blood and a pile of mushed up dead monster on the floor.
Or 50 dead monsters. Some areas are staggeringly well-populated, with crowds of zombies filling out your view to the horizon. Kill a good few and you might like to get your camera out, with the game rewarding you for taking shots of mass carnage. Without a comedy weapon, there are still vast numbers of moves at your disposal. X is hit, holding X does a charging attack. Pressing the trigger at the same time throws whatever you're holding. You're also told what buttons to press in little escape mini speed-games when zombies get their hands on you and their teeth near your neck. That's all you need to know to start having fun with whatever lump of scenery you decide to use as a weapon and smashing zombie heads open.
It's all thanks to the mall. Every shop is rammed with detail, letting you steal clothes, browse bookshelves, pick up tills, eat whatever you like and spend hours having fun without even bothering with the whole 'objectives' business of the game at all. The zombies help make the game fun too. You're never really in that much peril. They're generally slow and fairly stupid, just there for your entertainment during the day, taking it easy on you and stumbling blindly about. After a few minutes of playing, our stats say that we've already killed over 500 zombies. Most of them were with the lawnmower.
You also spend a bit of time escorting survivors to the safety of the control room if you're feeling public spirited. The survivors fight alongside you too, with old women punching zombies in the face while simultaneously sobbing and screaming with terror. If you do bad and let them die, the game makes you feel massively guilty by letting you know each time a poor civilian dies. Your reward for looking after the people is a level up bonus, one that increases Frank's attack strength, running speed, custard pie throwing distance and much more.
Dead Rising seems to have the same vibe as Grand Theft Auto, making you want to play it just for an hour or two of messing about. Not completing objectives, just putting stupid things on your head, changing shoes and trying to kill zombies with coat hangers from clothes shops and seeing how far you can throw custard pies. It's not possible to go wrong with a game that lets you throw custard pies at zombies.
This game is fun, plain & simple, all aspects of the gameplay is geared towards having a laugh and employing that "just one more go" aspect. The Marketplace demo lasts just 15 minutes and it makes you long for more, I've replayed the demo over a dozen times, brilliant!
i agree that its a fun game however i feel its also slightly unambitious. it uses the power of the 360 for nothing more than just throwing more and more enemies at the player. it may be a common theme with next gen games i fear.
maybe you didnt read my comment because it clearly says that i thought it looked a fun game. my criticism wasnt of the game more that the power of next gen consoles will be used only for throwing mass amounts of enemies at players. the only thing that sounded anything like a criticism in my comment was when i said the game was a little unambitious, and it is.
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