Dead Rising is a few years old, but the gameplay still rocks my socks. Here is the “official spiele”.
Dead Rising follows the harrowing tale of Frank West, an overly zealous freelance photojournalist on a hunt for the scoop of a lifetime. In pursuit of a juicy lead, he makes his way to a small suburban town only to find that it has become overrun by zombies. He escapes to the local shopping mall, thinking it will be a bastion of safety but it turns out to be anything but. It will be a true struggle to survive the endless stream of enemies, but players will have full reign of a realistic shopping center, utilizing anything they find to fight off the flesh-hungry mob and search for the truth behind the horrendous epidemic.
Review: Dead Rising gets 4 out of 5 headshots. The game is very close to being 5 out of 5, but I’ll get to the drawbacks later. Dead Rising puts you in a near present day version of Dawn of the Dead. Only this time, you weren’t able to keep the zombie horde out. The game focuses around a reporter named Frank. Frank is desperately trying to survive, uncover the true source of the zombie horde, and save any survivors he comes across. You do this with the aid of a mall map, radio contact with a mall rent-a-cop, and virtually anything you can get your hands on in the store. One of the most amazing aspects of this game literally is picking up anything in sight and using it to help combat your enemies. You can cruise on skateboards, swing a nine-iron, grab a bench, chainsaw some limbs, and more. The screen at times is filled from top to bottom with zombies all pushing and enclosing to feast on you so don’t get claustrophobic. A very cool and original feature to this game is the leveling system. As you kill zombies, uncover plotline, and save survivors you are granted experience. You use the experience to become stronger, faster, live longer, fight harder, and gain new maneuvers like tackling and zombie head jumping. What makes this original is your inevitable death. Once you die you are forced to restart the game from the beginning. However you retain any experience and abilities you have gained in previous attempts. Pretty cool in my book, because this mall is huge and it gives you reason and opportunity to search more areas then you normally would in a linear game. The only major drawback to this game is the communication. You receive all of your missions by a radio which in turn displays extremely grainy text for you to read and no actual audio accompanies it. The two way radio you have will go off numerous times during your adventure and the person on the other end always expects you to stop what you are doing and listen. You can’t fight, run, or interact with anything while you receive long winded text messages which you can’t read. The only way you can read the text messages is if you are running the game in true high definition on a high definition supporting tv/lcd. So in my case I’m sol.
Advice: If you want a never ending smash and dash with zombies galore it’s time to go shopping! Dead Rising is always there for my zombie smashing hunger and its originality sets it at least two maxed out credit cards ahead of its competitors. So come on librarians down to the mall it has all your shopping needs and the deals are simply to die for!
Take a look at the intro video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sh_-jvhascE
Official Website:
http://www.capcom.com/deadrising/