There are good times and there are bad times mixed through this game.
Dead Rising's premise is totally awesome, as I stated, but to keep it from being a repetitive hack 'n slash game they had to throw in a few more things than just thousands and thousands of zombies. So, there are a bunch of escort missions available to do along with a main storyline set of cases. Everything in Dead Rising takes placed based on time so you have to make sure you are in the right place when you need to be. Just to cover the sound and graphics real quick before getting into gameplay and my complaints, they are both of good quality. The zombies make all kinds of sounds and the voices are all done fairly well actually. You won't feel like this is as B-grade as it's premise may be. Graphically getting all those zombies on screen with such quality comes off as quite a feat. And there's no shortage of them or items in the mall. These two things don't hold the game back by any means.
At the beginning of the game you get dropped off in this mall where you are stuck till your ride comes back to get you in 72 hours ( about 6ish real time hours ). At the beginning you meet different people and start to learn about what's going on here. Then you are set to roam free for awhile. Now, I must say that my first time through the game I was roaming and I missed the first mission on Day 2 which cancels out EVERY OTHER MISSION so I was stuck with nothing to do for the rest of the days. Of course I could have reloaded, but thanks to Dead Rising's level up system I decided to spend the other 2 days exploring the mall and upping my stats.
This system I speak of is that at anytime during the course of Dead Rising you can actually start the game over and you'll keep all your stats. So exploring the mall for a few days is actually a good idea so that when you want to go through the main cases nothing is overwhelmingly difficult. My 3 days spent there were a blast, but by the end I was ready for some structure so I started doing the story. My first string of complaints came on about day 3. Dead Rising reminds me a lot of games like Silent Hill where you go up against a boss in hopes that your weapon is stronger than there's and you can hit them more time's first. I know, you'd think a game focused on killing zombies would have a great battle system, well it doesn't. It works pretty good for the undead that just kind of stumble around, but for someone focused on killing you, it can be very frustrating.
This becomes extremely apparent if you get yourself the "true" ending to the game (there are 4 endings) in which you'll probably find yourself running for your life and very frustrated at certain things of which I am attempting to not give away. This part of the game made me wish I had never started it.
Dead Rising does have a lot to offer though. The mall is definitely fun to explore and there is plenty of it. There are also plenty of survivors to save and psychopaths to take care of, not to mention the hundreds of ways to do it all. I'd say it's worth checking out, but I can't give it my recommendation to everyone just because it feels a bit broken. But if you can get over these flaws your in for quite a treat.