Dead Rising is a third person survival horror set in a mall in the fictional town of Willamette, Colorado. You take the role of Frank West, a photojournalist in the typical wrong place, wrong time scenario and finds himself trapped in a mall full of zombies. This game, like Dead Space is to Event Horizon, owes it’s very fabric to George Romero’s Dawn of The Dead.

As a photojournalist, the game starts with you taking photographs from a helicopter as you investigate the strange goings on in Willamette. While this feels like an interesting prologue, the photo taking is actually going to form an integral part of the game, which in all fairness, is completely pointless and annoying. Why on earth would you spend half the time taking photographs when you’re running for your life away from a hungry, undead horde?

One of the main attractions of this game is the variety of “weapons”. When I say weapons, you can use practically everything you come across to fend off hordes of zombies and to be honest, that’s very fun. Some are quite inventive however, such as outdoor parasols and skateboards and some make no sense, like the golf club and hockey stick. Instead of hitting the zombies with the sports equipment, you’ll projectile golf balls and hockey pucks respectively which in all honesty makes no sense. There are a multitude of awesome weapons of which you will enjoy depending on how sick you are. You can use a lawnmower to take out zombies a la Bad Taste and in all honesty, the shower head is a brutally sick weapon as inserting it into a zombies head will cause a shower of blood until it drops dead. Other awesome weapons include a rotivator, a bowling ball, a chainsaw and a fire axe.  The real downside to the weapons are that they break so easily and trying to batter your way through a mall full of zombies when you have weapons made of pink wafers  makes it tough and frustrating.

The game is littered with mid-level bosses in the form of psychopaths and are meant to represent the denizens of Willamette who have been driven mad from the zombie outbreak. The massive inconsistency with this is that the zombies never actually attack them yet have no problem jumping at you en masse. Plus it’s difficult to understand how a fellow human would choose to single out and try and kill a fellow survivor. The other stupid thing with these is that they have a stupid amount of health and most psychopaths will sustain about 5 headshots with a sniper rifle before falling down. I understand that this game is not designed to be realistic, but having adversaries with the HP of 100 to the power of Bullshit makes it a rather annoying hurdle to cross.No spoilers intended but the boss at the end of the extended story is so unbelievably cheap as you have to fight him with you fists on top of a tank surrounded by zombies. Go figure.

The game primarily was designed as a sandbox as you can go about as you please and the missions in no particular order, except for the one fatal flaw which Dead Rising has, time based objectives. No one and I mean NO ONE likes having literally seconds to complete each objective, story based or not, I hate being told to go here, there and everywhere before the time runs out. It defeats the object of being a sandbox if you don’t quite have the freedom to go as you wish. Compare this to games like Prototype and you see the major difference. It’s almost too easy to fuck up the main storyline because you altruistically trying to save some survivors.

Which brings me to my next point, saving survivors is the other part of the game. There are abotu 24 ones you can save and all of them have the same trait, they’re all completely fucking stupid. You can escort about 8 survivors at a time and even arms them with weapons from your inventory but that doesn’t mean they’ll have an ounce of common sense. It’s like babysitting on a grand scale and while I’m now going to reiterate my hatred of shepherding NPCs about like you’re a teacher on a field trip for a special school, this aspect of the game will prove to be rather frustrating. You can even arm them with guns and the idiots will still manage to get eaten if you move too fast for them. You also have the janitor telling you where all the survivors he can see on the security monitors are but after the while this gets annoying, especially seeing that he manages to ring in the most inopportune moment, like say, when about 30 zombies are trying to kill you, and then he’ll ring back and tell you how rude it is to hang up on him. You have no idea how much I wanted to feed the old cunt to the zombies…

The health objects are the other pickup you get apart from weapons and in all honesty I’m surprised that Frank hadn’t died of food poisoning way before I finished the game. The amount of frozen vegetables I ate to keep my health up was ridiculous! Health items will clog up your very small inventory as the slots have to be juggled between carrying health objects, power ups and weapons.

Overall Dead Rising is not a bad zombie title and if you’re a lover of zombie games, I would recommend this, especially if you loved Dawn of The Dead like I did. Preferably as a sandbox game i would have actually liked to explore the mall and use inventive ways to survive hordes of zombies, but the constant hassle of stupid survivors and fucking irritating time based objectives stopped that which could have been a great game.