Probably one of the most odd mixtures of wonderful and terrible game design ever...
The basic premise almost literally could not be better suited for a kick ass video game. Trapped inside an almost comically massive shopping mall populated with thousands of zombies. Scattered about the mall are countless objects that can be used as weapons in various ways both gruesome and hilarious. The graphics are gorgeous, load times exist but are minimal, and the foley work on the weapons is literally some of the best ever. If the "Kabong" sound you hear when smacking a zombie over the head with a guitar doesn't bring at least a brief smile to your face, you are a sad person. The games overall tone maintains a perfect mixture of deadpan black humor and generally campy zombie thrills. The plot is intriguing enough to maintain interest while never getting in the way of gameplay. Multiple endings, massive varied indoor and outdoor environments, tight responsive controls, sharp detailed graphics, good level design, and good voice acting despite having no tacked on Hollywood voice actors, a floating camera that performs well enough to at least not get fascinated with some random corner while zombies are gnawing out your Achilles tendon, and interesting but optional side quests like photojournalism, and Dead Rising starts out as a game that would have to try very, very hard to be bad.
And try hard to be bad it does. Not hard enough to ruin a perfect premise and great basic design, but enough to really smack it down hard from the level it should be on. Let's review:
- Weapon degradation. You get at most 20 or 30 hits from each weapon before it shatters in your hand. Since at no point in the game are you really starved for weapons it makes no sense.
- Escort Missions. Essentially this is the entire game.
- Forced paths. For all its open world design you are unrealistically forced from place to place. You are given no time to explore or just walk around randomly killing zombies which is what a game like this is tailor made for.
- Annoying NPCs. Otis takes the cake here.
- Save System as a difficulty factor.
Had Capcom put in random button mashing quicktime events they could of taken home a gold for cramming every bad game design into one game.
Long story short I can't tell if Dead Rising is a great game with bad game play or a bad game with great game play.