Dead Rising Review

Dead Rising Review | October 30, 2012
Xbox 360, Xbox One, Nintendo Wii, PlayStation 4

Dead Rising is a third person zombie base melee survival horror. There is some third person shooting but it much more fun to play it is melee combat. Does fighting zombies ever get old? Dead Rising takes place in a city called Willamette in Colorado. Frank West a photojournalist is called in to report on some kind of disturbance in the town only to find out that it is over loaded with zombies and it looks like someone is trying to cover it up. So he gets trapped in a mall (thanks Dawn of the Dead) as it is filled with and surrounded by zombies. The mall is also filled with crazy psychopaths who have had some sort of mental breakdown and are killing anything that moves. Now on his own Frank tries to rescue as many survivors that he can and holdout until his rescue chopper shows up all while he tries to figure out what started the outbreak in the first place and who did it.

The gameplay is based around time limits. It is an open world game mostly. You can go into any shop, try on different cloths, and use anything that you can pick up as a weapon against the zombies and the psychopaths. If you don’t get something done before the time limit runs out then you miss out on it. You can’t just go back to that area. So if you don’t do what needs to be done before the time limit runs in the main storyline, then you miss out on figuring out who caused this outbreak. This was one of the first games to show how much power the Xbox 360 has. There are dozens upon dozens of zombies everywhere and hundreds of zombies in a lot of places. Over all the game works. Picking up almost anything we could find and taking out zombies with it is always fun. There is also a camera element to the game, Frank is a photojournalist after all. You take pictures to unlock new missions and get points for taking the right shot. The better the picture the more points you get. We really like that even if you died you could restart the game with all of your levels. So if you died or finished the game and you were on level 27, then if you restarted the game you would start on level 27. Leveling up gives you more life, makes you fast to escape attacks, makes you stronger both giving damage and taking less damage and allows you to carry more stuff like weapons and health. We did die a lot early on because we were not at a high enough level or could not carry enough items.

Like we said over all we liked this game but we did have some problems. The one that was the most annoying is the people you are trying to save, to put it bluntly they are stupid. You try to get them to follow you they don’t, you give them weapon to fight back they don’t use it. The worst is some of them will run directly into a giant group of zombies start to get eaten and wait there while you have to come all the way to save them. Early on in the game we just let them die until we replayed the game at a higher level. The psychopaths are also very difficult early on. We were able to take out some of them but it was not until we beat the game and restarted from the beginning did we get them all. In the end the game has a lot of fun. The gameplay is entertaining, the story keeps your attention and you want to figure out what’s going on. Keeping your level after you restart the game is a plus when it comes to your character. But, getting all the way to level 50 does not make the AI you are rescuing any smarter…and man are they stupid, like shoes are smarter than some of them. Dead Rising took us about 15 hours to beat the game the first time through. Replay is above average because you do want to go back and replay the story and try to rescue everybody. The game is a buy under the $35. It is fun and taking out zombies never gets old.

8.0 out of 10
Good Game

8.0 out of 10
Good Game

Rated
M for Mature

Rated
PEGI 18