Not as Good as Promised
The story is decent horror movie fare. You're a photographer investigating unusual events in Williamette, CO and you head off to the mall to see what is going on. Apparently, what is going on is a whole lot of zombies. Tons of the things. Thousands upon thousands of the slack-jawed shuffling undead. You need to figure out why they're here and be done within 72 hours. So, yeah, it starts off with a good story and the time limit part of this really cranks up the intensity appreciably.
The game is a beautiful game. The zombies look properly dead and everything looks appreciably next-gen. And the game is comically interactive. If you can pick it up, you can use it to dispatch zombies. There is no shortage of weapons --- my favorite was actually the lawnmower, which sliced things up nicely. There is, as you'd expect, a lot of blood and gore (though, if zombies are undead, the volume of blood seems a bit odd --- there aren't that many living people left for them to feed on, right?). I also wish to praise the voice acting, which was top-notch. It's easy to condemn bad voice acting, so I'm going to praise good acting when I hear it and this game has a lot of it. Sure, some of the characters are over-the-top, but the audio as a whole was spectacular.
The bosses, though, are not the zombies, but your fellow living humans. So, yes, the game also has a message. And the psychopaths you deal with are all unique and extremely difficult. From the gun shop guy who can just pelt you wish buckshot constantly to the psychotic clown with 2 chainsaws and gas balloons, the one feeling you won't get is deja vu. None of the bosses, for me, were terribly easy to kill. Most took time to wear down and this was made more difficult with the existence of all of the zombies that you ALSO had to deal with.
In addition to handling bosses and zombies, you are also expected to take pictures of the goings-on --- after all, you ARE a photographer. And you get bonus experience for good pictures in several categories, with the "erotica" category always being the weirdest. Nothing in the game screams "sexy" to me, personally. You also have to help the few living survivors in the Williamette Mall escape out of the mall and to safety.
This is the first of the problems. I have never, at any point, enjoyed escort missions in the past. They were the worst part of flying games, vehicle combat games --- any kind of game you can imagine, escorting somebody/something somewhere was always the biggest of headaches. The AI of your fellow survivors, by and large, is horrible. The police captain you meet early on is useful, but the rest are just as bright as the zombies. They straggle behind you so badly that even though you cleared a lane for them, they get to it so slowly that it closes off on them. It's an annoying problem that really drags down the fun factor.
Another flaw is aiming. If you have a gun, you basically have to go into first-person mode to hit anything. Stay in third-person mode and you will be lucky to hit a wall. This makes such battles as fighting the convicts in a jeep a nightmare as they drive quickly in circles around you, firing a huge machine gun and you have to deal with zombies all around you. Just a bad, bad choice by the designers.
Finally, the save system is inexcusably bad. You can only save in a few small locales, which makes doing things like trying to save hostages not really worth the energy since if you die while saving them (which happens a lot), your game isn't saved and you have to backtrack a lot. So, I would bypass a lot of hostages because it'd been a while since I'd been able to save.
Dead Rising is a good game with some serious problems that hurt it. It's the kind of game that will probably have an amazing sequel. As for this game, it's not BAD. It just isn't great. A lot of annoyances exist here.