The Dead Rising franchise was one that I'd heard of quite early on through videos from YouTubers like PeanutButterGamer and SpaceHamster, and while I never got the chance to actually play any of the games, the way that people talked about them made me associate the name with goofy zombie hijinks in a shopping mall. Because Dead Rising 3 was an Xbox One exclusive and Dead Rising 4 was apparently the game that killed the franchise, the main game in the series that I was interested in checking out was Dead Rising 2, but when I came across a copy of the first game roughly two months ago, I decided to give it a try. Dead Rising was another one of those games where I could barely even tell whether or not I was actually enjoying what I was playing until it was over, because while a lot of its ideas seemed quite novel on paper, their execution left a lot to be desired.
Timers in video games tend to be hit-or-miss for me (which is partially why I still haven't beaten Pikmin months after starting it), and so I wasn't sure how I'd feel about a game that was entirely made up of them. In Dead Rising, every main and side mission is timed so that you could potentially miss out on them entirely if you spend too long messing around in the Willamette Parkview Mall, and while I found this to be a bit iffy at first, I grew to see the thinking behind this choice. Not only do the timed missions give a lot more value to the upgrades and abilities that you unlock whenever you level up, but they also dramatically amp up the stress of actually playing the game, as it has you wade your way through oceans of zombies just to get a chance to progress the main story, let alone rescue a survivor or fight one of the many unique psychopaths that are spread out across the mall. Unfortunately, Frank West's only way of actually accepting these sidequests is by answering calls on your transceiver, and not only do you never know when these calls will show up, but they also leave you totally vulnerable to attacks, and so this system of accepting missions makes it practically impossible for you to do everything in Dead Rising without reloading saves constantly.
Despite its simple premise of being trapped in a shopping mall with an army full of zombies and spending the next few days trying to figure out how all of this came to be, Dead Rising makes the player juggle a lot of different tasks at once at all times, ranging from the missions they have to complete to the ratio of weapons to healing items in their inventory, and while there were some bits of breathing room during my playthrough, there was always at least one thing that I had to devote my full attention to, which made the immersion feel immediate and natural. The core gameplay of killing zombies with whatever items you can find is fun on its own and opens up a lot of opportunities for wacky moments, but the mechanics that this loop revolves around end up feeling janky and unreliable. Thanks to the awkward aiming for your ranged weapons and a complete lack of enemy targeting for your melee attacks, you never really know if your attack will even go in the direction that you wanted it to, much less actually connect with what you're trying to hit, and since every weapon in the game has limited durability (along with the unlockable skills having finicky inputs and incredibly situational uses), I often ended up just spamming the jump button with the hopes that the zombies would miss their attacks.
Despite how much it had going for it, Dead Rising had two big, glaring flaws that kept me from enjoying the game as much as I wanted to, as they reared their heads very early on in my playthrough and remained irritating until the credits rolled. Although backtracking in a game like this makes sense, Dead Rising still got quite repetitive pretty quickly, as having to take the exact same routes to go to main areas like the security room over and over again made having to fight the same zombies using the same weapons that I picked up in the same spots felt immensely dull, and since trying out other weapons or paths led to me getting killed at worst or being left with less resources at best, I ended up sticking to those same routes and getting bored as a result. The AI for the survivors is also absolutely atrocious, and practically every survivor that I tried to rescue would get killed on the way to the security room because they would constantly run into a crowd of zombies and get overwhelmed with no chance of me being able to help them out. Fortunately, the unresponsive AI also appleid to the game's bosses, and so I was able to cheese quite a few of the more cheap fights in the game. Dead Rising had a lot of interesting concepts, but I wouldn't really say that I had very much fun playing it, and while I don't know how long it'll be before I eventually check out Dead Rising 2, I do know that playing this game made me really eager to finally watch George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead.
Timers in video games tend to be hit-or-miss for me (which is partially why I still haven't beaten Pikmin months after starting it), and so I wasn't sure how I'd feel about a game that was entirely made up of them. In Dead Rising, every main and side mission is timed so that you could potentially miss out on them entirely if you spend too long messing around in the Willamette Parkview Mall, and while I found this to be a bit iffy at first, I grew to see the thinking behind this choice. Not only do the timed missions give a lot more value to the upgrades and abilities that you unlock whenever you level up, but they also dramatically amp up the stress of actually playing the game, as it has you wade your way through oceans of zombies just to get a chance to progress the main story, let alone rescue a survivor or fight one of the many unique psychopaths that are spread out across the mall. Unfortunately, Frank West's only way of actually accepting these sidequests is by answering calls on your transceiver, and not only do you never know when these calls will show up, but they also leave you totally vulnerable to attacks, and so this system of accepting missions makes it practically impossible for you to do everything in Dead Rising without reloading saves constantly.
Despite its simple premise of being trapped in a shopping mall with an army full of zombies and spending the next few days trying to figure out how all of this came to be, Dead Rising makes the player juggle a lot of different tasks at once at all times, ranging from the missions they have to complete to the ratio of weapons to healing items in their inventory, and while there were some bits of breathing room during my playthrough, there was always at least one thing that I had to devote my full attention to, which made the immersion feel immediate and natural. The core gameplay of killing zombies with whatever items you can find is fun on its own and opens up a lot of opportunities for wacky moments, but the mechanics that this loop revolves around end up feeling janky and unreliable. Thanks to the awkward aiming for your ranged weapons and a complete lack of enemy targeting for your melee attacks, you never really know if your attack will even go in the direction that you wanted it to, much less actually connect with what you're trying to hit, and since every weapon in the game has limited durability (along with the unlockable skills having finicky inputs and incredibly situational uses), I often ended up just spamming the jump button with the hopes that the zombies would miss their attacks.
Despite how much it had going for it, Dead Rising had two big, glaring flaws that kept me from enjoying the game as much as I wanted to, as they reared their heads very early on in my playthrough and remained irritating until the credits rolled. Although backtracking in a game like this makes sense, Dead Rising still got quite repetitive pretty quickly, as having to take the exact same routes to go to main areas like the security room over and over again made having to fight the same zombies using the same weapons that I picked up in the same spots felt immensely dull, and since trying out other weapons or paths led to me getting killed at worst or being left with less resources at best, I ended up sticking to those same routes and getting bored as a result. The AI for the survivors is also absolutely atrocious, and practically every survivor that I tried to rescue would get killed on the way to the security room because they would constantly run into a crowd of zombies and get overwhelmed with no chance of me being able to help them out. Fortunately, the unresponsive AI also appleid to the game's bosses, and so I was able to cheese quite a few of the more cheap fights in the game. Dead Rising had a lot of interesting concepts, but I wouldn't really say that I had very much fun playing it, and while I don't know how long it'll be before I eventually check out Dead Rising 2, I do know that playing this game made me really eager to finally watch George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead.
NovaNiles
4 months ago