Dead Rising (Xbox 360)

Sound

The audio department of Dead Rising certainly doesn’t skimp at all. It’s packed with zombie moans, groans, sounds of destruction and violence along with the odd spot effect or two depending where you are in the mall. The rev of the chainsaw is a particularly gruesome sound as well as a satisfying one and there’s much amusement to be had by listening to the clang of a well paced shovel.

Music

The music to Dead Rising shifts through the traditional horror style instrumental pieces, to rip roaring hard metal style tunes in the various boss battles. There’s even the obligatory mall music that plays in the background.

Voice

The voices have come a long way since the days of RE and ‘Take this Jill, it’s a lock pick’. The voice acting in Dead Rising is great with a genuinely rough personality for Frank West, he’s likeable enough but still arrogant and a typical journalist after his big scoop with little care for anyone else. It’s obvious that the voice talent in the game is something special with some truly twisted performances from the voice actors, Adam the Clown being one of my all time favourites.

The talent is taken from the world of video games as well as cartoons, and it is top notch. There are no duff performances at all.

Final bite…

Dead Rising is a game that will take more than one play-through to get the secrets, there are plenty of achievements linked in with escorting survivors and some of them like Frank the Pimp require you to escort 8 or so female survivors at once, a task that’s not made any easier by the strange and quirky AI.

You can unlock a new mode of gameplay when you complete the game on Overtime mode (where you can get the true ending – there are several endings to get as well) and this game mode is called Infinity mode, it’s a survival mode where you can try and last as long as possible in the mall.

The downside is that you lose a health block every minute and you have to plan your route carefully through the mall. There’s also no saving allowed as far as I can tell, so you have to have a good chunk of game time to be able to indulge in this mode.

It is zombie slaying fun at its highest however with thousands of zombies to slaughter in inventive ways; there are various combinations that will yield better results than others and plenty of secrets that will make the game easier if you can find them. You can get 2,000 PP just from putting a frying pan on a stove, this allows you to not only use the pan as a swung weapon, but to also press it into the faces of the zombies for that extra amusing ‘hiss’ of satisfaction.

Dead Rising does what it says on the tin and opens up a new franchise for CAPCOM - what the sequel will bring, is unknown, but for now there’s no finer zombie masher out there until Dead Rising 2.

There is no multiplayer on the game but it is LIVE aware and you can compete for the longest time survived online. Rankings are uploaded to the global hall of fame and you can see who’s amassed the most PP and survived the longest in Infinity mode.

As an aside: I hope they put in multiplayer for a sequel though, that would be a seriously fun feature across LIVE, coop survival in a mall full of zombies where you could help other survivors out.

I seem to remember something similar on the PS2, but it didn’t take off.

Now writing this review has made me want to go and play the game again, so I’ll be slaying zombies for the rest of the day. Wolf out.