Dead Rising is just an amazing achievement and has stunning features, but most of all a whole load of fun and killing!
Dead Rising's main success is the amount of weapons and items you can use to slay the undead. If you've been thinking "There's no way they could literally put hundreds of zombies in a mall that would make the game too difficult" then think again! The mall's swarming with hungry zombies and you're not the only one in their either. There's survivors all over the place, and you could save them or just let them die if you want to. However, saving them does give you a benefit (See "LVLing up").
Dead Rising's ridiculous amount of weapons makes the game's novelty value rise up, making the game feel next-gen. Like most folks say, Graphics don't always make a game next-gen. Alot of the 360s hardware is used in this game, such as very realistic character models (particulary the main characters), and the large amount of zombies. There's no chance all of this could be done on the regular Xbox. The zombies aren't the most detailed characters in the game, but they look great anyway. The environments are also pleasing to see as well, as it does indeed make you feel you're in a mall.
LVLing up: This is a feature used in Dead Rising to level up stats to make your character stronger and have more abilities. Everytime you kill a zombie, or an enemy, you get something called PP. As you reach a certain amount of PP, you LVL up. Everytime you level, you earn either a stat point or a new skill. You can also earn PP by rescuing survivors. You can LVL up a maximum of 49 times, and to be honest, if you really want to benefit in this game, you do have to LVL up. When I was first playing the game (1st day) I had no combat skills to fend off the undead and the game was rather difficult at first, particulary the story missions. So what I did was mess around and not bother with the story missions at first. This made me LVL up faster and there were paticular places which gave you more PP than others. Once I got new skills and had a better chance of surviving, I started to enjoy the game alot more than before,
Dead Rising has many other unique gameplay elements as well. You can use the camera (Since you're a photographer) to take snapshots of things in the mall, such as zombies, survivors, or just sightseeing. Sometimes, camera shots can earn you PP and sometimes you have to use them it in story missions. You also have an option to do optional missions which give you a benefit of rescuing more survivors. Another cool thing about Dead Rising is the health and food system. Instead of having to look for medkits all you have to do is find some food or drink and use it. It gives you your health back and best of all there's a huge supermarket so you'll never run out. Some claim this makes the game far easier but you can only carry a limited supply anyway so the gameplay is still balanced and fair.
Dead Rising's mall is rather large and has plenty of shops for you to look around in. Restaurants, Clothes shops, Sports shops, it's all there. Unfortunatly, alot of the shops aren't safe to stay in so for all those campers its no good here as the zombies tend to just follow you in. There's also an outdoor leisure park which has plenty of zombies and great water reflections, plus a car park (which I won't spoil to much I'll just say if you want a hell of a lot of zombies to kill you go there!) all of its there. You can't mindlessly save anywhere in the mall and many have complained that this makes the game difficult but the save points are scattered around perfectly. You save in the toilets, rather odd but its one of the safest places to be in the game! :)
Once the three days are up, you have an option to end the game however you like it to be. There is a total of 7 different endings and if you just mess around you tend to get the bad endings, though of the endings have good and bad points. !SPOILERS! The best ending (Ending A) is actually a rather bad ending because you don't escape the mall anyway. !END SPOILERS! If you get the correct ending, you get a new game mode which I won't spoil to you. There's another mode you unlock called Infinite Mode and you stay in the mall the whole time and you're health goes down constantly and the only way you can get it up is by eating. You can't save in this mode either and everyone is against you!
The sound used in Dead Rising is pretty good. It has some nice mall music and the satisfying sounds of using your weapons against the zombies never get old. The voice acting is pretty good in this game, and you'll hear alot of groaning zombies the whole time you play. :) Now, the replay value. Yes, one of Dead Rising's strongest points in the whole of the game. There's no doubt you'll come back to this game. Maybe just for mindless zombie killing like I do. But there's more things to do. You can try and go for all of the Xbox 360 Achievement points. I admit, these are pretty well thought out, and the majority of them are rather easy to get. There's about 5 difficult ones so for those who want a challenge in Achievement Points there's a couple of them in Dead Rising which I still haven't got at this time of posting. That's not all the replay value of Dead Rising either, you might just want to explore the whole of the mall, or try to rescue everyone in the mall. It's a game like GTA which has tons of replay value and somehow the game never gets boring.
So that's all there is to tell you about this fantastic yet addicing Xbox 360 game. it's a game all of you need to own, paticulary fans of Survivor Horror and Resident Evil games, or those who just want to kill loads of zombies. Dead Rising is just an amazing achievement and has stunning features, but most of all a whole load of fun and killing. If you've always wanted to be a zombie slayer wanabee, then look no further than Dead Rising!