Dead Rising

Review from Yug - Thursday, 09 November 2006 @ 12:00am

Zombies.

Think about that word for a second, and think about the first image that comes to your mind. Is it the slow moving mindless kind of zombie from George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead series? Perhaps you think more of the fast and deadly infected kind from the movie 28 days later. Or maybe your mind wanders to the comical stop motion versions from the Evil Dead series.

Personally, my mind skips to a lesser known Super Nintendo game I used to play way too often called ‘Zombies at my Neighbours’, and the multitude of video games that contain zombies. Whether your fighting them (Resident Evil), playing as them (Stubbs the Zombie), or just trying to get them to goto the bathroom (The Sims – no really), zombies have always had a comfortable spot in video games since they first came out.

So it’s no surprise that this is one of the best games I’ve played on the Xbox 360 so far, and it’s all about zombies.

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Dead Rising sees you playing Frank West, a gritty freelance photojournalist who on a tip has travelled to the small Midwestern town of Willamette which has been mysteriously quarantined. The protagonist is also not some slick suave looking stud, but more of a middle weight average looking guy, who gets tired if you run too far and doesn’t really take many risks. It’s a nice change. I’m not really giving anything away (unless you’ve NEVER seen a Zombie movie) by saying that you end up stuck in the town just before you find out that the entire place is filled with ZOOOMMMBBBIIEEESSSS!!! Actually you’re stuck in the town mall for 3 days, after which your helicopter will come back and pick you up. During these 3 days, you have the opportunity to find out exactly what has happened and uncover the conspiracy. And kill A LOT of zombies.

Actually, can you ‘kill’ a zombie, considering a zombie is already dead? I don’t think so, but for the sake of this review I’m still going to call it ‘killing’ as such.

You might think a game that is limited to just a shopping mall might be a bit boring, but it really is anything but. The mall is a huge multilevel monstrosity that dwarfs any of the Australian shopping centres I’ve ever been too. Of course it’s filled with every specialty store you could imagine, themed playgrounds and rooms, an expansive park in the middle, and an underground car park/tunnel system. I’ve played through the game a few times and I STILL haven’t seen every area in the mall.

When it comes to weapons, you have so many options it’s not … well actually it IS funny. You can pickup most stray objects from anywhere in the game, so every store in the mall becomes a bizarre weapons stockade. The sports store has golf clubs, skateboards, baseball bats and coat hangers … the restaurant has butchers knives, pots and pans, and mops and buckets … the music store has guitars, CD’s and cash registers. You can also visit a bookshop and hold onto books which will increase certain stats or abilities.

The problem really is that the majority of these items you get in the stores aren’t really any good at killing zombies. They are either one hit gimmicks (such as a shower head that is used once – you stick it in a zombies head and it showers out blood) or only knock the zombies over for a few seconds (like the light up plastic toy sword). You’ll find yourself sticking to two or three main useful weapons and having food occupy your other slots. Although, some of the objects you get can be insanely destructive (chainsaws) or just bizarrely obscure (stuffed teddy bear heads), but they can all be used to fend off the hundreds of zombies that occupy each area in the mall.

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Did I say hundreds? Maybe I meant thousands, because if there’s one thing this game will be remembered for, it’s the ability to put so many zombies on screen at the same time that it gives 99 Nights a run for its money. The zombies in this game are all the slow moving kind though, only staggering into a jog if you get particularly close to them. It’s actually quite easy just to run straight through a crowded area of zombies without them touching you, but if you make one false move then suddenly you’ll find yourself swarmed and overwhelmed.

It’s great that the game doesn’t shy away from the themes that run along any decent movie or game in the zombie horror genre. That is excessive violence, bloody gore, and exploitation. When you swing a sledgehammer down onto a zombies head, you hear the satisfying ‘thunk’ and the zombie goes down with blood and guts going everywhere, as blood splatters all over your clothes. It couldn’t have been animated any better if they tried, and adds to the games black sense of humour.

Lets be honest though, there’s only so long you can go killing zombies before it starts to get a bit boring after awhile. Yes, it’s true, it really does. It’s a good thing then that killing the zombies actually isn’t the focus of the game. Every so often you are provided with opportunities to meet up and save people who are stuck at certain areas around the mall. These ‘scoops’ will happen very often, and as far as I’ve found it is IMPOSSIBLE to save everyone. This provides something of an issue for me, as I’m the kind of person that wants to find out the best way to play through a game and then play it that way. For a game to actually not even give you the ability to save everyone, to force you to make life or death choices no matter what you choose, I found that quite a bold decision, and it changed the way I personally approached the game.

The survivors you rescue all have their own unique personalities as well. Some will want to follow you as soon as you find them, others have gone crazy, some will pickup objects and help fight their way back to the safe area, and others will need you to carry them on your shoulders. Add to the fact that you can save multiple people at the same time, and you’ll be transporting little rag tag crews back to the safe area as you try to keep them alive and away from the zombies that were so easy for you to avoid on your own.

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It’s at this stage though that I started to get really frustrated. You can hand a weapon to a survivor, but that doesn’t mean they will be good at using it. While you can dodge and weave your way through the zombies, the survivors tend to either stop and fight or run along after you depending on … nothing in particular. You’ll find yourself running along then looking back and seeing the survivors are stuck fighting zombies and need you to go back and help them. When you are transporting multiple survivors, the situation can become very tense.

What’s even tenser is that the entire game revolves around time. There’s a certain time you have to meet and save each survivor before they get overrun by the zombies. To follow the main story you have to be at certain areas to see certain important events at the right time. Add to the fact that the game is set over 3 days and there’s a very obvious countdown, and you don’t really get much time just to stop and smell the corpses so to speak. You’re always in a rush, always hurrying, and always panicked about reaching each place in time. It’s a good game dynamic of course to keep things moving and interesting, but it changes it from being a leisurely exploration game (ala Grand Theft Auto) into a race against the clock. Whether that’s a good or bad thing will depend on your personal tastes.

Because of this though, the game begs to be played through multiple times, not just so you can save different survivors but also so you can take the time to check out the different places that you may have missed before. There is just so much to see and do that can’t be crammed into the games 72 hours.

And of course it’s all so god damn pretty on the Xbox 360. The detail on the zombies alone is worthy of praise considering how many of them there are. The in game cut-scenes especially show off the amount of detail that has gone into the character models, and they do a great job at conveying emotion through the characters body and facial movements. The female characters look like they are straight out of a Dead or Alive game, even down to the same proportions (someone at Capcom likes their cleavage shots). My only gripe is that in the larger areas the draw distance is a bit slack, with zombies suddenly ‘fading’ into view if you approach them too quickly.

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The sound effects deserver special mention as well, as I tried this game out with the Pyramat Sound rocker, and it was truly creepy hearing the moaning undead as they would creep up behind you. The only other sounds were that of the ‘bad elevator music’ you’d usually hear in a mall which added to the creepy desolate feeling that was trying to be created, and when you went outside there would be a heavy metal soundtrack (mainly because the outside part was dominated by a bunch of convicts in a jeep with a heavy machine gun … don’t ask). And to top it off, for once in a game like this (I’m looking at YOU Resident Evil) the voice acting and dialogue was actually really really good. I mean, there’s some things that just can’t help sounding pretty lame (“So you mean that those things out there are zombies??!”), but on the whole it was convincing and likeable.

It’s not all ice cream and lollypops though as the game has some horrendous load times. I’m sure there’s a lot to render in some areas, but considering you tend to do a lot of backtracking through the same areas of the mall that take you about a minute to run from one end of the entrance to the other, only to be greeted with another load screen, well … you get my point.

There is also the fact that the boss battles in the game are so difficult compared to fending off zombies. The combat mechanic is designed for bashing through hordes of the undead, not for going one-on-one with crazy psychopaths. Your character is slower, less equipped, and has less life to be able to deal with these super powered bad guys, not to mention the fact that every time you get hit you fall over, needing to waste precious seconds before you can get up and keep moving, after which you’ll find yourself only half a second away from being hit again. It’s needlessly frustrating.

There are other little things in the game which try to elevate it and keep your attention, such as the photography challenge (you are a photojournalist after all) where you have to try to get different photos of action, horror, drama and erotism. The more points you get the higher your level becomes, and the more combat moves you learn – although most of those moves don’t get used, because you usually have a weapon of some sort. There are also cars and bikes that have adequate driving physics, different costumes you can change into in the different stores, and even some zombie sniping sections.

It all adds up to a neat little package with some fantastic replayability and a nice sick sense of humour, if you’re into that sort of thing :)

Summary

Heaps of initial fun and gimmicks eventually wear off to leave you with a challenging game with heaps of replayability, but it’s not something that will be to everyone’s tastes.

Pros

Fantastic detailed graphics and character animations, a huge shopping mall to explore, time limits give a sense of urgency and create tense challenges, heaps of reply value, creepy sound effects, entertaining voice acting, loads of blood gore and violence.

Cons

Out of the hundreds of items and weapons only about 10 are truly useful, draw distance is a bit disappointing, boss battles are difficult and frustrating, and a time limit on the game might not be everybody’s cup of tea.