I forget who called this "a good game trying to be a bad one", but it fits as Dead Rising is often very fun and highly irritating in equal measure. The Romero-esque plot of being stuck in a zombie-filled mall is played with a charming B-movie camp, epitomised by its lovably corny hero Frank West, and the combat based around smacking zombies & psychopaths with whatever you can get your hands on is super-satisfying. But the actual narrative is a bit weak and poorly structured, and the game is beginning to show its age with its hilariously ugly models, sticky controls, & occasional technical jank. Furthermore, every great mechanic - the timer which forces you to carefully pick & choose your missions, or the choice between loading an old save or restarting the entire game with your current stats - is marred by an equally annoying element, such as the reliance on escort quests plagued by notoriously dumb AI, or the 'scoop' calls which leave you momentarily incapable of self-defence and, should you be injured in the meantime, scold you condescendingly and force you to listen to them all over again. The campaign's broken up (for no apparent reason) between a 72-hour period in the zombie-filled mall and an 'overtime' section with the mall largely taken over by the army, and the game frankly runs out of steam in that latter part, as all the fun side characters are ditched and we slog through a bunch of dull fetch quests before a boss fight with a generic military nut whom we've literally never interacted with before. There's also an 'infinite' mode in which you must survive as long as possible with your health gradually draining and all survivors turned hostile, but said survivors only appear at preset times and in between fights there's nothing really meaningful or entertaining to do. I should clarify I DID have fun with Dead Rising - it's hard not to when it's basically the plot of Dawn of the Dead via the splatterstick comedy of Braindead. But its blatant flaws meant I was definitely over it by the time I finished, and I can't say I'll be in any rush to go back for a while.