Well here we are again with another game review and this is a game that is quite special to me, Dead Rising is a game that released all the way back in 2006 and was one of those games that was originally going to be a console release game for the Xbox 360 now with this in mind I did not get my Xbox 360 until December 2007 and with this I got Dead Rising a few weeks later so I was late to the party but I will always remember being excited talking about it to some of my old friends and having really good conversations with them about the gameplay itself as it was a game where I was told you can use anything as a weapon, now this is something that is a bit far-fetched especially with what the game entails but I can appreciate how much this game went around just by word of mouth as I hadn’t heard of this game until that point.

Now on with the review, well the game in itself is an Open Roam Sandbox game made by CAPCOM and this at the time was something new aside from the now action-packed resident evil series and with this game it gives the player a full open mall to explore and use any kind of household items available against the never ending undead horde and with this it doesn’t give you the 28 days later zombies where they strap their Nike’s on, no this is classic George A. Romero zombies where they shamble and are much easier to pick off with a well placed sledgehammer to the face.

You play as Photojournalist Frank West an average guy looking for the next scoop in Willamette, Colorado when there has been talks of an incident occurring there and the national guard blocking off entry and exit points. Little does frank know that the people that are attacking others are in fact the undead and he finds this out after entering the mall not long before the zombies break in.

From the off point you are given a time limit of 72 hours, now this is the time frame you have to get the story and get out using the helicopter Frank rode in on, this is used as a main frame for the story to take place as each objective has a window time for you to do the mission by but this does not mean that you wont have time to enjoy yourself by smacking zombies with a mannequin from a clothing store. The developing story is something that has some potential but unfortunately falls flat in areas but still stands as a good point in storytelling as the game is not all comedic as it sets out to be. one very good thing about this is you do not have to follow the story if you want to just smash zombies up then you can ditch the story almost entirely and carry on playing which is something really cool and with your xp progression it can be carried over into a new play-through which adds more replay-ability

Now on top of zombies you also have a plethora of bosses that come into play with their own justifications on what they do, some are just plain sick, and some are sympathetic, but all are deadly but with defeating these bosses you can gain access to saving survivors which will grant XP bonuses and open up more missions for you to do later on.

There is also a Levelling system in the game where with each level you gain more abilities that frank can use as well as attribute increases and each ability that is unlocked makes Frank a lot more equipped to deal with zombies more or less barehanded and this is nice to see from a progression perspective.

There is a quite a bit of history behind this game including its early test footage and beta builds which unfortunately are hard to find but all of this is currently being preserved by a Youtuber called Stip0 who researches the games early development and provides footage comparisons of earlier builds of the game which has also recently peaked my interest in this game again thus this review.

One area that is tons of fun but pretty much trips on itself are the achievements themselves now 50 achievements is pretty much a standard and include most of them to be done within a single play-through but one aspect of this makes the whole grinding / achievement hunting almost impossible as 2-4 of the achievements require you to play a game mode called “Infinite Mode” now playing this for the first time you would think that you would just spend time killing zombies and seeing how long you could go for or something along those lines but in all intents and purpose this is essentially survival mode where Frank would need to stock up on supplies to wait out for however time you last, the achievements associated with this is 5 Day and 7 Day Survivor which is what it wants you to achieve but does not tell you how inside infinite mode. You basically have to spend 14 Real-Time hours of surviving the hell hole that is this game mode to achieve the 7 day survivor. The other two achievements that can be associated are indoorsman and outdoorsman which require you to spend 24 hours (in-game) outside and inside the mall which sounds simple but in infinite mode it is bloody boring as you’re pretty much sat around eating food in timed intervals for two hours each aside from killing mini bosses that drop food along the way. Why these achievements got put in I will never know as they have been the most tedious thing I’ve ever had to do to get a 100% score on the game.

One thing that I have personally enjoyed is achievement runs and replays of this game in recent times as the game to me still has a lot of charm especially for an almost 20-year-old game and is something to behold as a really strong entry in a troubled IP.