Dead Rising

A disclaimer on the box may disingenuously declare no connection between Dead Rising and George Romero’s 1978 low-budget horror classic Dawn of the Dead, but you’ll be way too busy mowing your way through Willamette’s zombie-infested shopping mall to bother drawing lines between dots. Besides, the much-loved Resident Evil series gives Capcom considerable undead cred. As intrepid photojournalist Frank West, you’ve been airlifted into a quarantined town filled with struggling survivors and the zombies who love them (or at least love to eat them). The temptation is to simply wander the mall, explore the stores and kill at will considering every fathomable object—from pistols to pans to parasols—can be used to slice, dice, bludgeon and otherwise gorily dispatch the hundreds of slow-moving corpses that fill the screen thanks to the 360’s next-gen tech. But DR is a sandbox title with a time-limit—that helicopter is returning in 72 hours and if you haven’t solved the mystery of the zombie epidemic by then it’s still game over. Making matters worse is a frustratingly stingy save function that threatens to turn you yourself into a mindless monster because messing up a mission can force you to re-start from the beginning (albeit as a more powerful player). Capcom’s defense is that it makes the game more challenging, which is true, but considering how much incredibly detail went into constructing this massive mall is, a true free-roaming option would have been nice. Still, a minor complaint for a game that otherwise way exceeded expectations, gave the 360 a much-needed boost and provided horror fans with so much beautifully rendered bloodletting. Since a sequel is inevitable, hopefully they’ll, uh, not borrow from 28 Days Later so we can try tangling with some zippy zombies.