Dead Rising

Capcom's zombie game finally arrives. Find out if it's worth the hype.

	Version Xbox 360	Developer Capcom	Publisher Capcom	Genre Action

By Alex Wollenschlaeger

Capcom's bloody Xbox 360 action game Dead Rising has got something of a split personality. On one hand, it's a quintessentially modern game, complete with good looks, gruesome sound, and inventive means for bringing death to the undead. But at the same time, it bears two-decades of baggage, including a core game design quirk that would have Shigeru Miyamoto backhand the coder who proposed the idea to him. Despite this, I can't stop playing it.

Let me explain. At one point during my first playthrough of Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, I got to a stage where I had to light a ring of torches using one of Link's abilities. Somehow I had managed to miss getting the ability earlier in the game, but all I had to do was backtrack to that point, and earn my power-up. Skills in hand, I headed back to the torches and carried onwards to Ganondorf. The game allows you to recover from your mistakes.

Contrast this with Dead Rising. In one early scene, you have to take out an armed crazy person. In the heat of the moment, I misunderstood what Brad, a g-man I was reluctantly working with to get to the bottom of the mall-of-zombies story, had told me to do and he ended up dead. To my horror, a domino effect effectively brought an end to the story bits in the game, forcing me to either carry on hacking away at zombies without purpose or to go back to an earlier save point.

This would be less of an issue if the save system in Dead Rising wasn't so broken. You've got one save slot per storage device and in-game save points are rare. Combine this with the game's real-time clock and you've got a recipe for disaster. Imagine saving your game during a story section - cases, they're called - because some real-world event requires your attention. You come back only to discover that you need to be on the other side of the mall in five minutes. Because the mall is so big, there's no way you can make it there in time, and you can't go back to an earlier point in the game (one save slot, remember), leaving you just one option: restart the game.

If you manage to control your rage enough to actually give it another go, you'll at least have the pleasant option of keeping any experience you've gained so far. This is reminiscent of a system Capcom had in one of its earlier RPGs, Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter for the PlayStation 2. And there are hints in the early stages of the game that levelling up by restarting in this way is something the designers had in mind.

I'll concede that the save system does contribute to the tension of the experience. Knowing that you there are very real downsides to death keeps you on edge, but taken in the context of the demands of our daily lives, it seems an unfair system, especially when the rest of the game doesn't skew nearly as hardcore. For many people, the story will be an add-on to the main thrill of simply offing as many zombies as possible, and you can do this in increasingly bizarre ways. Just about anything in the mall can be used as a weapon of sorts, meaning obvious things like chainsaws and hunting knives and non-obvious ones such as soccer balls and soda cans.

And it's here that you'll find the depth on offer. It's interesting to find out what brought about this mess through the game's plot, but the real narrative is how you grow and become more comfortable killing the undead. This is confirmed by the Achievements, which are mostly based on non-story tasks you need to complete. There are all sorts of unlockables to be found should you choose to dig deeper, and if you're anything like me, that's exactly what you'll want to do.

Graphics Sound Gameplay Depth Presentation OVERALL 8.0 8.0 7.0 8.0 8.0 8.0

THE VERDICT: Dead Rising is not a perfect game - the save system puts paid to that. But it's one of the rare games that allows you to do the same thing in seemingly unending ways. It rewards you for scratching beyond the surface. You could play it for an hour and get a good idea of what it's about but it's only when you start living in the game world and learning the layout of your surrounding, and finding the best ways to exploit them, that you truly start to get it. Western Xbox 360 developers should take this as a warning. Capcom has shown that Japanese game designers can bring it on the Xbox 360, and we should all be happy for that.