DEAD RISING

produced by Keiji Inafune

directed by Yoshinori Kawano

published by Capcom

platforms: Xbox 360, Wii

 

review by Adam Armstrong

11.18.2008

 

 

The chance to be in a zombie apocalypse from the safety of your own couch.

 

Frank West is a photojournalist with a hot tip about Willamette Mall. He has a helicopter drop him off on the roof, the pilot giving Frank only 72 hours to find out what’s going on before he comes back to pick him up. Frank finds that the mall is overrun by zombies. Frank has to save over 50 survivors somewhere in the mall while trying to discover the reason the outbreak occurred and fight of psychopaths that lose their minds once the outbreak occurs. And if Frank can make it through all of that he has to face special-forces.

 

This is one of my favorite games. I’ve long since been a fan of the zombie genre and it is great to jump in feet first and fight off a few thousand zombies. Almost anything in the game can be used as a weapon from machine guns to lady’s handbags. You can stick to the missions or you can just get in a car and run over some zombies while you blow off steam. One thing that I really like is that if you restart you can save all of your advancements and skills to the same character. In other words, if you are at level 20 and get killed and start over, you are still at level 20. I also like that fact you can go just about anywhere and manipulate almost anything in the game. The down side: you can only advance so far and carry so much.

 

Crosses fingers for a sequel while he spends too much time playing this: 5 out of 5