Dead Rising

Sorry about this being so late, I meant to post it before I left for school. I finally moved in and got situated, so I felt like it was a good time to put it up.

When I first started hearing about Dead Rising, my mind connected it with Dynasty Warriors. I’m not really sure why, but I always pictured the game as mindlessly running around killing zombies all day. A few days before the release of the full game, a demo came out on the Xbox Live Marketplace. The demo changed my thoughts on everything about the game and convinced me to go preorder it.

Graphics: Dead Rising is a gorgeous game. The graphics are extremely detailed and aren’t so over the top that the system lags. There can easily be a hundred zombies on screen without any loss at all. You can wear different outfits and see lots of detail on them. None of them look too similar! You can even see different details on the faces of everyone, zombie or human.

Sound: Dead Rising has decent sound effects. Weapons all sound good, the voice acting is good, and the zombies sound good. The elevator music in elevators and the boring mall type music while you’re in the mall are nice touches. Sometimes the sound can get bad in the game, though. When you’re driving around the maintenance tunnels, the sound can get relatively jumbled and confusing.

Game play: Game play is handled extremely well. The game has a wide array of moves you learn as you level up. When you first start, you’re extremely reliant on weapons because of how easily you can handle bigger groups with them. As you level up more, you gain more freedom in your play style. Some of the combat can be mindless, but at times you have to think about what you’re doing so you don’t get killed too quickly. It keeps a good pace going and holds up with solid action.

Lasting Appeal: If you don’t mind killing zombies over and over, the lasting appeal is pretty good. Certain achievements unlock new outfits or new items for you to use, so if you’re a collector there’s plenty of reason to play through the game multiple times. The wide selection of weapons and ways to beat the game could get plenty of people to play multiple times, too. The normal 72-hour mode has 5 or 6 different endings. Once you’ve finished the different modes, you unlock 2 more that extend the game play and story even further.

Final Notes: Dead Rising isn’t for everyone. The violence can get extremely overboard quickly. I would suggest keeping the game far away from children. Disembowelment, decapitation, and other things similar to that give it a good reason to be rated M. With all of the things you can do in the game, I would recommend it. If you can deal with the game play and the gore, Dead Rising is an extremely solid game that deserves to be up there with the rest of the good action games on consoles. Killing zombies may get old eventually, but for now it’s the most fun I’ve had on the 360 other than Chromehounds.