Metareview - Dead Rising (Xbox 360)

The summer gaming slump shuffles on, slowly, lifelessly, with vacant eyes, targeting the pile of grey meat residing in your skull. It's been a tough summer, and Capcom's new zombie-killing/shopping simulator aims to spread (through a post brain-chomp exchange of bodily fluids) its unique brand of humor and action throughout the 360 nation. So, will Dead Rising take its place in the zombie gaming pantheon next to Capcom's Resident Evil series?

• Gamespot (84/100) - points out the repetition elephant in the innovation room: "As a departure from the zombie games of old, Dead Rising is a great success, wonderfully blending campy undertones and visceral, zombie-killing action into something highly playable. It suffers from structural faults, and the game does find itself leaning heavier on repetition than you'd probably like, but Dead Rising overcomes these shortcomings by being a lot of fun to play.

• 1UP (80/100) - also praises the title's inventiveness while noting the "typical" problems , writing, "Dead Rising brings to mind memories of other ambitious games that tried to expand the survival-horror genre (like Blue Stinger on Dreamcast back in the day). It has all the hallmarks -- new play styles, a decidedly different pace from the Resident Evil franchise, and (in theory at least) next-generation graphics. And while it suffers from some typical early-generation pitfalls, it's a feverishly inventive game that triumphs over the very shortcomings that threaten to hold it back."

• IGN (83/100) - reiterates the fun factor, and credits said fun with saving the game from its other problems: "With a better save system, more intelligent NPCs, a more forgiving story progression, and tighter controls, Dead Rising could have been even more fun than it already is. Even despite those issues, after several times through it's impossible to deny the appeal inherent in slaughtering Willamette's zombified shoppers."

Sounds like we have a game where you kill zombies over and over and over and over and, despite being repetitive, manages to be inventive and ambitious all at the same time. Killing hoards of zombies in a shopping mall is pure fun? Who'da thunk?

See Also:
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