Great open ended fun with a slightly annoying structure.
The Engine is very impressive with open ended GTA style gameplay (i.e. go wherever you want whenever you want) but with vastly superior graphics than any other GTA to date. The game plays similar to GTA with drivable vehicles (although not many) and interactive items spread all over the game. Food and drink item are used to increase health, while clothing items can be found to change your characters appearance. Other items are used as weapons with everything from chainsaws to frisbees available. The gameplay is much fun with massive, highly impressive hoards of zombies coming at you from all angles. The game features story driven missions as well as survivor rescue and psychopath killing (Psychopaths are survivors driven insane by the situation that must be defeated to save innocents/yourself ) side missions. The game also features an XP/character expansion system which encourages you to rescue survivors in order to increase your stats as well as learn new skills. This part of the game cant be faulted, it even encouraged me to replay the game. The story and voice acting is spot on with many cheese B-movie overtones, just the way it should be. The one major problems lies with the story though unfortunately. The game progress' in what is called 'real time' . This means that you have a watch with which to check game time and you must be at certain locations in order for the story to progress. This. coupled with limited save options result in destroying the games open ended and highly involved game play as are constantly rushing from place to place and never have time to enjoy the games depth. Despite it's shortcomings 'Dead Rising' is a highly enjoyable game. It's polished to perfection (I never noticed a single bug) and is great fun. Highly recomended.