How will I get through ten thousand zombies to the next story event in ten seconds? I probably won't.
The first thing I noticed about the game was it's campiness. The opening scenes are so ridiculous that they are hilarious (town overrun by raging zombies eating people and destroying things), but they are funny in a creepy way. By the way, that's something that this game does really well; it manages to creep you out but it also keeps the mood light enough for you to laugh at the more ridiculous parts of the plot and the combat. Anyway, I get dropped onto the town's shopping mall and informed that I have 72 hours to get a scoop (being that I am a photographer and all) before the chopper returns to pick me up. So by now I am a little bit more interested in the game. I head inside and that's were the real gameplay starts. The first thing I notice as I play is the absolutely ridiculous numbers of zombies on screen. I don't think I have ever seen this many characters on screen at once. There are literally hundreds of them, and each one seems to be acting a little differently than all the others. I am sure that a lot of the animations are repeated, but there are just so many of them that I never noticed it. Some areas are so thick with undead that you can't walk unless you hack them down, which is a ton of fun and I will get to that next. But until then , let's finish up the visual aspect of the game. The zombies don't look stellar, but with so many of them on screen you won't even notice, and your character model looks good, if a little blocky. The animations are well done, using a chainsaw actually looks like using a chainsaw, swinging a baseball bat looks like it should, etc. The blood is perhaps a little too overdone; there are gallons of it every time you kill an enemy or they kill you, but I guess it looks good and should be expected in a game like this. The mall itself looks decent, too, although not horribly detailed and using some relatively bland textures in some places. You won't notice this unless you are looking for it, though, so this game ends up doing pretty well with graphics.
The sound is great, the moaning and groaning of the zombies is genuineley creepy and the splatter of hitting one with a bat or slashing them with a knife is sickeningly realistic, but the voice acting is pretty bad in all honesty, and the firearms seem to lack a lot of punch, although this isn' t huge issue since they are in short supply in the game. Overall, though, the sound in this game is extremely well done and helps support the game's creepy but goofy atmosphere very well. The gameplay, like I said above, is surprisingly fun. I don't think I have ever played a hack and slash game that I haven't gotten bored of within a couple of hours, but the sheer variety of weapons available (everything from chainsaws to flower pots to CDs) keeps things fresh and for some sick reason hacking these zombies just seems very satisfying (in a creepy, gross kind of way). You can spend several hours just killing enemies and have a decent amount of fun trying out all the weapons in each area, and this is definitely the game's strong point. In fact, there is little more to this game than simply indiscriminantly killing the undead. The story is pretty weak, it sounds like something a 12 year old who watches too much science fiction TV came up with and none of the characters really seem to make much of an impression, although you will feel guilty when someone you are escorting gets eaten by a horde of undead beasties. Don't worry, though, this feeling of guilt dies quickly as you do the next in a series of seemingly hundreds of repetitive escort missions in the game. But you probably won't even do them, because the game won't let you.
What? How does the game not let you? Well, that's simple. It puts a timer on everything. When you hear you have 72 hours in the mall, you actually, literally, have 72 hours (game hours, that is, which are much shorter than in real life) in the mall. And that leaves you barely enough time to do the main story missions, much less rescue survivors. There are only two sections in the game with long enough breaks in the story to do other things like the rescue missions, and even these don't seem to give you enough time to save everyone like you are supposed to. Everything in the game is based on a schedule, meaning that every event in the story happens in a particular place at a particular time. But what if you're late? Well, you're screwed. The entire story ends right there and then, and you better hope that you saved a while ago because if you didn't you may not have left yourself enough time to get to the meeting place on time and will have to restart the game. Not the level, not the chapter, THE GAME. Dead Rising has one of the most unforgiving and ridiculously stressful game layouts I have ever seen. There are about four save points in the entire mall, and they all seem like they are deliberately placed in the most hard-to-get to places. And the mall is enormous, so it will take you a long time to get to them and you will probably be eaten by the swarms of enemies before you get there, forcing you to play the last hour of the game again. You could just ignore the story line, but then you will get a crappy ending that isn't really worth it and have to spend 10 mindless hours hacking up countless zombies with no real purpose to the madness. I personally took great pains to be everywhere on time only to get the wrong ending because I didn't talk to someone before getting to the mall's roof to meet the chopper at twelve on the third day (after the 72 hours were over) and didn't leave enough time to go back and talk to her after my last save. I started the game over (for about the third time), but quickly became bored with the frustrating save system and the story since I had seen it all before. I haven't play the game since.
This super-frustrating save system and the ridiculous time table the game places you on makes it seem like Capcom deliberately made this game as frustrating as possible. It would be a fantastic game if it weren't for the soul shattering consequences for missing a meeting or checkpoint, but these bugs just ruin it for me. It's still fun to deal out gruesome deaths to waves of zombies, but there isn't much lasting appeal when the game is this unforgiving. Add to this that there is no online support whatsoever and you have a game that could have been so much more than it is. Hopefully if there is a Dead Rising 2, these faults will be sorted out and we will get to see the kind of game that Dead Rising should have been. Until then, though, I can't recommend this for anything more than a five day rental.