< Back   Dead Rising - Review

---

Back in the heyday of the PSone, Capcom set themselves a reputation as the masters of the newest emerging genre of the time - the survival horror. And whilst Dead Rising may not be so much "survival horror" as "survival-slaughter", it's another notch in Capcom's return to form as the unshakable champions of the zombie-fest.

Presenting itself as much of a rip-off of the Dawn of the Dead movie as it is a homage to the George Romero classic, Dead Rising is one game that has certainly generated more than it's fair share of hype since it's conception, along with plenty of anticipation by gamers that it can actually live up to it's own hype.

Does it? Yes and no.

The game's basic premise sees the player taking control of the shoes of lovable charmer / general prick Frank West, equally trapped and set loose in the pseudo European Willamette shopping mall (the main hub of the game), with only a handful of humans and many zombies to keep him company. Many, many zombies.

Unlike Capcom's other well known zombie-fests though, the overwhelming odds against you (an understatement if ever there was one) are rarely a cause for fear or worry. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the opening hour or two of the game, as the huge scale of the battles and the variety of deadly and visceral options with which to deal with them become quickly apparent to the player.

It's very easy to get lost in all the carnage, and spend forever just disposing of the never-ending hoard of zombies that religiously track you down. Basic combat is reserved to a simple but well refined one button system where one button is largely responsible for every action. What it lacks in complexity, it makes up for in variety and flare. It's a flawlessly executed system for the most part, and (at least early on) it can be so engaging that any interest in continuing the story becomes an afterthought. In Dead Rising though, it's entirely possible to spend so much time zombie slaying that by the time it starts to become tiresome and you decide to finally trek further on in the story, it may already be too late to do so.

Unlike almost every game ever, Dead Rising is held together through a rather unique narrative system that doesn't drive the player through the pre-defined sections of the story. This isn't to say that there's isn't a linear path mind. There is, but not once are you forced into followinh it. In fact, it's impossible to unearth the whole story in one straight play-through, but at any time you can choose to restart the game, with any leveling up done to Frank kept intact, making it easier for you to make progress, and allowing you to (hopefully) unearth the whole story on subsequent playthroughs.

This system can be very counter-productive to the game itself, unfortunately, and by going against the grain so strongly, it leave itself open to the risk of alienating some people. The system doesn't kill the game entirely, but it does work against it - with only a little refinement and some more leniency, it could have worked far more successfully.

Minor niggles aside, it is far from enough to take away from the game's deserved place as an icon for polished, visionary game design. Uncompromising in every respect, it's an undeniable truth that Dead Rising offers something truly unique to a genre that until recently has very much gone stale. It reaches beyond what many games in the past have tried to achieve on a much smaller scale, and for this achievement it deserves to be held in high regard. It may not be flawless, but there are few examples of true next generation gaming as pure as this.

- 8 / 10