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By Chris Wolf
By Chris Wolf
You haven’t lived until you’ve fought off hordes of zombies in a coffee shop with bottles of orange juice.
Capcom revitalizes the beat ’em up genre with “Dead Rising”, throwing you into a mall with hundreds of zombies, which, unfortunately for you, haven’t decided to go vegan just yet.
But, hey, that’s alright. You’re freelance photojournalist Frank West, and you’ve got more than enough weapons at your disposal. Pretty soon those damn zombies won’t know what hit them.
The game has just about every type of weapon, or makeshift weapon, you can think of.
Sure you could slaughter some undead with shotguns, but wouldn’t it be a lot more fun to use lawnmowers, showerheads (gives a whole new meaning to the word bloodbath), beach umbrellas, or a frying pan?
Surprisingly, the plot of “Dead Rising” is actually very deep. The writers did a great job of balancing political intrigue with funny, B-Movie action, and it never gets too serious.
It’s impossible to get the whole story during one play through of the game (fastest I’ve seen is three play throughs) but this gives the game even more replay capability.
In a nutshell, it’s about freedom of the press and American consumerism.
Leveling up in the game is just
as awesome. Once you earn enough prestige points (PP) you gain a level, allowing you to carry more items, run faster, etc.
Now, what’s so great about this is that you have multiple ways to gain PP.
Since you’re a photo journalist, you can take pictures of the events unfolding and, depending on how good your photo is, net yourself some major PP.
This throws some decision making into the mix: you can be a naughty little reporter and take a picture of a man getting eaten alive by zombies or you can choose to save him, which will still give you a modest amount of points.
The only major complaint about this game is the save system. It is way too easy to mess up and have to restart the whole game from the beginning (Although you get to keep all the levels you’ve gained along the way).
There are only four places to save in the whole game, and that’s only after you’ve gotten through 80 percent of the story. Fortunately, the game is so fun to play you won’t mind restarting from the beginning.
A few minor complaints to address are the boss fights and text.
You would think that since the game is all about using unconventional weapons, you would use these in the boss fights. Sadly, this is not so.
Every boss in the game requires that you use guns on them, which is kind of perplexing since it would be a lot more fun to smash them to death with a bowling ball, or even a lawn chair. I found myself stumbling upon a boss and restarting my system because I had to go stock up on guns for the fight.
Unless you have an HDTV, you’re going to have a hard time reading the text in the game. It’s readable but you’ll be squinting your eyes so much to read the mission information that it’ll start to hurt.
These two things aren’t game breaking, but you will definitely get annoyed.
“Dead Rising” is definitely one of the better games I have played on the XBox 360.With an ESRB rating of Mature it’s sure to be a blast.
If you don’t have it already, I suggest putting down “Oblivion” for 20 minutes to go pick it up. How could you ever regret fantasy murder and mayhem?