1 Photo Journalist, over 200 gib-splattering weapons and a crapload of zombies make Capcom’s ‘Dead Rising’ that killer 360 app. everyone’s been waiting for. You play Frank West, a freelance photo journalist trying to discover the strange goings on within the town of Willamette. The story begins as you fly over town in a helicopter where you take control of Frank’s camera and are taught the simple mechanics of ‘Prestige Points’ (or PP for short) which determine the speed at which Frank levels up. You can get more or less points depending upon what category the photo slots into (Brutality, Outtake, Erotica and Other) and how well you’ve framed your subject. You can zoom in and out with the B and A buttons and snap the pic with X, the game tells you how well you’ve done with a sort of Burnout Crash-Mode style identification method. This is fairly simple and helps the flow of the game pick up nice and slowly. There are, of course, other ways to earn PP but we’ll get to that later.
The initial Photography tutorial over, you are left completely to your own devices. You are told you have 72 in-game hours (about 6 hours real time) to do pretty much anything you want. If you wish to figure out the truth about why there are undead hordes out for a wonder in the local shopping centre you can, but the game really doesn’t put any pressure on you to do anything if you don’t want to. On one play through, we just stood on the helipad until the chopper came back 3 days later. Okay it was boring as hell, but it proves the previous point.
(That’s enough of the storyline. Now onto the good stuff!)
At the beginning of the game all you have is the ability to Jump, Punch and Run which makes the task of avoiding zombification a little trepid at first, but quickly you’ll find yourself in possession of a baseball bat and a great big evil grin. It is immensely satisfying to witness the first zombie’s skull cave under the pressure of your swing along with the gushing fountain of claret emanating from the neck stump. That feeling fills your black soulless heart with the deepest Neanderthal joys of straight out un-censored violence that it so passionately craves. It NEVER get’s old, especially when there are so many different varieties of zombie death that you can provide. The weapons range from bottles to barbells, CDs to shotguns, lawn mowers to heavy machine guns. This is the game to satisfy the sinful excitement in the ultimate destruction of all things that aren’t you.
Dead Rising really shows off the 360’s capabilities when it comes to the graphical side of things. For one, there doesn’t seem to be any pop-up or random spawning of enemies on screen that we can notice and so you are left with a staggering amount of moving objects on screen at any one time. As the number of zombies increase in relation to the time spent in the game, it can get to a point where all you can see are waves of bloodied heads closing in on you. All of which are fantastically drawn, there are enough different zombie models, it seems, to make sure that you never see many of the same zombie in any one place. To be quite honest though, you wouldn’t let them stand around long enough for you to care.
Capcom boast an implemented ‘Swarm Technology’ feature that supposedly is what makes all the zombies instantly attracted to you. As they shuffle gormlessly towards Frank, we often wander why it is they don’t just try and eat each other. It’s not as if they would put up much of a fight. Then we shake any thought from our heads and get back to propping traffic cones onto unsuspecting corpses and watch as they stumble around completely useless and blind. Then we laugh and we carry on.
If just hacking away at an endless stream of zombies and taking pictures of your deeds sound tedious to you, (though we don’t know why it should) there is the secondary focus of saving helpless individuals you can work at. A total of 53 survivors (54 including Frank) are strewn throughout the mall and it is your job to go and rescue them and bring them back to safety in the security room where you began the game. Again, this gives you the power to do whatever you want. You are informed throughout your travels by Otis the friendly mall janitor safely tucked away in the security room, that there are people in peril and that you should go help them out. It’s up to you whether or not you do so, their lives hang over you like a piano on a rapidly fraying rope. If you do decide to go give them a hand you’ll be rewarded with lots of nice Prestige Points and hopefully can level up increasing your health pool, the number of items possible in your inventory and your roster of melee attacks. Some of these ranges from a simple kick in gut to a devastating neck twist, where you rip a fallen ex-mallrat’s head from its torso. Delicious.
It is probable that at one point or another you’ll have to stop playing for a moment, perhaps to sleep or maybe to let loved ones know that you are breathing, this is where you may feel a bit confused. Saving the game takes place at a number of sporadically placed toilets and also a sofa within the security room. Many people may have trouble adjusting to the fact that the save system works differently than in most other games. Let us explain, when you save mid-play you save both your location and current progress. The game will then ask you if you wish to continue playing or if you want to end for the time being. If you select the latter you will be able to pick up where you left off via the main menu. Seems simple enough so far doesn’t it?
There is also another method of saving, whereby if you for whatever reason die, you are also asked whether or not you would like to save or load up from where you started the session. Many people have misunderstood this screen (me included) and have saved thinking they can just continue on from the nearest save point, where as in actual fact only your current character level, points and weaponry are saved leaving you with no other option than to start ‘72 hour mode’ from the very beginning. This is somewhat annoying, but since the replay value is so high this is easily overlooked.
Another blaring problem is the ever so obvious lack of multiplayer. It would have felt amazing to be able to slash your way to victory with another human being laughing incessantly at the havoc they are creating over Xbox Live. Maybe including some sort of double team type takedown moves for you both to have fun with? But alas, this idea obviously didn’t come across the guys at Capcom, and for one reason or another, was left out of the running.
We could go on and on and on about what you can do in Dead Rising like little giggling school children who have just come back from 2 weeks in Disneyland, but it’s time this review came to a close.
Capcom’s slash-em-up is a gruesomely fun experience which plays on the true definition of gaming. Countless routes and activities make the apparent short playtime completely irrelevant. The lack of multiplayer is unfortunate but in the long run does nothing to damage what is the greatest 360 title of this year so far… |
