Dead Rising is surpisingly one the most unique and the best Action/Adventure title so far for the Xbox 360
Being able to use practically everything as a weapon makes for a great and unique gameplay experience, entertaining boss-battles great story, good graphics, awesome sound-effects and the save-system makes the game challenging and also gives it great replay value
The Bad:
The AI of the bosses and survivors tend to be quite dumb sometimes, Very few saving locations and saving your game with to little time left on the clock can be a disaster, also Otis bloody phone calls during the missions are pretty annoying
The Review;
Yeah, yeah i already know you sneaked peaked on the score and you know that I like this game, let me tell you this though...I thought this game would suck, I tipped it to be one of the worst titles to come out for the Xbox 360 this year and I couldn't imagine how a game with tons of zombies in a mall could be any fun, well as you now can see I was wrong..oh well lets cut to the chase now shall we?
You start the game in a helicopter playing as photojournalist Frank West sent out to cover a story about mysterious happening that have recently occurred there. And you get there only to find there is zombies absolutely everywhere. Then you fly over this giant mall and a government chopper shows up forces you to land and Frank jump off and tells the helicopter guy to pick him up again in 3 days. So you have to survive in the mall during these days to think out why almost everyone have turned to zombies, uncover the plot and save as many survivors as possible, oh and also use everything in your surroundings to take out the zombies in the most brutal, bizarre or hilarious ways.
The gameplay in Dead Rising is quite straightforward though not that repetitive since you'll face different phsycopats and have different objectives and all the time use different weapons, all missions are also time-based keeping the action more pumped up and also a little more challenging. What also does the game more challenging is the save system..both in a good way, but also in a bad way.
The good is that you really have to be and your feet and stay alive until the next savepoint witch forces you to think and focus at the task at hand. The bad is that if you die you can be set back several hours gameplay wise if you're not careful since the game has very few autosaves and only one saveslot. This can be very punishing since if you save the game with very little time left on a mission and you can't finish it in time you'll loose the mission, if it's a Story mission you will be forced to start over again since you no longer wil be able to progress in the story, though you can at that point save your status for Frank...yep that's correct the game also has some RGP elements meaning that you will raise in level, gain new skill get more health etc. and if you save your status you will begin the game from scratch but you're a lot stronger, though I would have preferred a solution with more saveslots or at least more autosaves. There is another good thing about this though, that you will have much reason going trough the game several times handle different situation in differently.
The graphics in the game are good and sharp the characters models look great as do the mall that looks very believable though it's not the best I've seen on the Xbox 360 but it's good enough to be eye pleasing and won't be anything that bugs you
The sound in the game is awesome, great music, great but also funny voice acting and the sound effects from the different weapons are basically perfection.
So overall Dead Rising is a great game. Though a great games with problems that could have been solved differently without much effort. Still it's a game that fans of the genre and those that have been waiting to slay zombies in all kinds of ways simply have to try out.
//ZimpanX