For many years now, videogames have had this weird fascination with zombies. We’ve seen games where you shoot them, games where you run over them, and even games where you play as them. There’s something about the undead that really captures the imagination of players and developers alike, and Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop, a port of an Xbox 360 game, continues this fine tradition on the Nintendo Wii. But a fine tradition does not automatically equal a fine game, so I have been given the task of finding out if Dead Rising makes the cut, or ‘chop’ as it were.

One of the strangest things about this game is the opening screen, which claims that this game should not be played by anyone under the age of 18. The box contradicts this by clearly stating that the game is rated MA15+, and therefore is okay for anyone over the age of 15. I feel like sending this game to Michael Atkinson (the Attorney-General of South Australia who is single-handedly preventing the introduction of an R18+ rating for videogames) to prove that an R18+ rating for videogames is a good thing- you know, because our current system where many R rated games are given MA ratings allows game sellers to legally sell adults-only content to people under the age of 18, and a proper R rating should actually make it illegal for those games to be sold to people who shouldn’t be playing them- but I digress. In the end, it wouldn’t amount to anything, because this game doesn’t actually contain anything that warrants an R rating so it’s really a moot point.

Also I think I was just looking for any excuse to get this game out of the house and out of my life, because it is absolutely terrible. It should really have a warning screen stating that the game should not be played by anyone, anywhere, of any age. Why do I hate this game so much? Read on to find out.

Dead Rising draws on a very familiar premise. A small town is overrun with zombies, and the survivors are trapped inside a shopping mall. A reporter tries to cover the event and ends up unravelling some sort of conspiracy. Really, if you haven’t heard a similar kind of story in a hundred other sci-fi/horror films or games (particularly Dawn of the Dead, where they actually are trapped in a shopping mall), you’ve clearly led a sheltered existence. In Dead Rising, you play as the aforementioned reporter, and have to do whatever it takes to survive.

Re-using a familiar premise is not a bad thing. In fact, the game starts off really well and the cutscenes/voice acting are a huge highlight of the game. However, since you’re stuck in a mall with no combat training, the gameplay revolves around grabbing whatever object you can find and using it to beat the nearest zombie’s head in. So basically it’s like MadWorld, but with zombies. The problem is that, unlike MadWorld, this game is not fun.

A group of slow, brain-dead zombies... or, as we like to call them in Western Australia, 'Perth Glory'.

Every mission consists of you rescuing survivors, or going somewhere in the mall to talk to someone. The process of reaching these people is exactly the same every time- grab a weapon, kill zombies. The reason why combat is not fun is because… well, there are many reasons, but the main one is that the weapons themselves are not fun. You either grab something big like a shopping cart or skateboard and use that to plough through the hordes of zombies, or you grab a handheld weapon that you swing to kill them. In the end, it all boils down to pressing A and watching zombies fall down. Also, you can swing the Wiimote in any direction for a more powerful attack, but this is completely useless because the motion controls are extremely unresponsive. You have to wave your hand around as hard as you can, and even if some miracle causes your Wiimote movement to register, the zombie you’re facing has probably attacked you already. You’re better off just using A, because it’s responsive and it works. Some of the items are designed to be funny and cartoony, but they just end up being boring. For example, a lawnmower feels exactly the same as a shopping cart, except it’s really, really, really slow and the novelty of ‘mowing’ zombies wears off quickly. There are some unique weapons like the post-hole digger, but they really only have one ‘novelty’ attack which gets boring after the first couple of times. Also, why bother even picking up weapons when you can just kill zombies quite easily with your bare fists? Maybe the zombies are tougher on Normal or Hard difficulty and your choice of weapon becomes important, but on Easy difficulty it really is possible to charge through a crowd of zombies swinging your fists and succeeding.

The other method of killing zombies is with guns, and lo and behold, the gun controls are actually really good. You use guns in a way that is similar to Resident Evil 4 (RE4) where you hold down a button to draw your weapon, at which point you aim and shoot. The Wiimote aims the crosshair and the control stick moves the camera around, so shooting is actually quite intuitive and well thought out. However, unlike Resident Evil 4, where zombies reacted depending on where you shot them, shooting a zombie in Dead Rising will have the exact same effect regardless of where you shoot it. If you want to knock a zombie to the ground, shooting it in the leg will have just as much chance of doing that as shooting it in the head or torso. So basically, shooting suffers from the same problem as melee combat- all you do is press A and watch zombies fall down. Not particularly fun.

Speaking of RE4, Dead Rising seems intent to rip that game off in every possible way, and then find ways to screw it up. Items can be mixed to make more powerful items, but this can only be done in the food court. Seriously, who wants to cross an entire zombie infested mall just to chuck two pieces of fruit in a blender and see what comes out? Another similarity is that the Z button, in conjunction with pressing down on the control stick, allows you to spin around 180 degrees. Unfortunately, unlike RE4, pressing the same button along with up on the control stick does not make you sprint, which is a shame because that would have been really useful!

Even the main character throws up over how bad this game is.

Anyway, once you’ve massacred as many zombies as you can, you reach your objective. This may be a survivor, in which case the game will pad the mission out in the most ridiculous ways possible. Sometimes you have to stand there and talk to the same survivor two or three times just to get them to follow you. Why can’t you just talk to them once and have all of the dialogue in one conversation? Also, there was one mission where a survivor denied my help, and then screamed for help after I’d gone through a door, which meant I had to go back through the same door and save her. Now, I don’t mind trying to add some intrigue or variety to the process, but why couldn’t she scream out before I’d gone through the door so I didn’t have to sit through TWO MORE REALLY LONG LOADING SCREENS then I needed to?

In other cases, your objective may be a boss, and the bosses I played were so bad they almost made me laugh out loud. Seeing as you have no evasive manoeuvres of any kind (or even the ability to sprint, something which was vital when fighting RE4’s bosses), this game’s bosses are absolutely incompetent in order to make things fair and balanced. Or maybe it’s because the developers got lazy, but either way, the bosses in Dead Rising run around in random directions, usually into walls, while you stand still and shoot until they give up or die. There’s no strategy or technique in the boss battles whatsoever. Couple this with the fact that their animations are so shockingly bad and unnatural (that’s right, the shuffling zombies have more fluid animations than the actual humans!), and they almost resemble a game glitch as opposed to an actual adversary that was intentionally programmed into the game. Seeing as this game is so desperate to be compared to RE4, let’s make another comparison and say that playing Dead Rising’s boss encounters after playing the ones in RE4 (which were tense, exciting, and required strategy and smarts to win) is like walking out of a seven course dessert buffet, tripping, and falling face first into dog poo.

The controls are convoluted and confusing, and they never really feel natural (except for when you’re shooting). To interact with objects or pick things up, you have to press two buttons at once (Z and A). This was clearly done so that A could be used as the ‘interact’ button but you could still hack your way through a crowd of zombies without accidentally picking stuff up or talking to people, and in this regard, it works. However, when you’re trying to pick up an object and you end up spinning around on the spot three times because you couldn’t press two buttons at exactly the same time, it’s a massive pain in the arse. And speaking of which, the Z button’s only function is to spin you around when you press down on the stick, which means it does absolutely nothing when you’re standing still or walking forward! Why not have Z as the lone interaction button? Why bring the A button into this at all? Also, the controls and tutorials are very unclear when it comes to the finer points of item use. Not once did it say that you had to press B to get off a skateboard, bike, or shopping trolley, resulting in one extremely frustrating situation where I was riding a skateboard in circles when all I really wanted to do was smack the zombies who were killing the survivor I was trying to rescue. On top of this, you’re never told exactly how to reload a gun, so you kinda have to guess it yourself. In fact, most of the instructions are extremely vague when it comes to telling you which buttons do what.

You'll always look scary when you carry a big gun... unless you spend the next five minutes running into walls.

The graphics in this game are pure garbage. I am not lying when I say that I have seen far better graphics on the Nintendo 64. These graphics are blurry (particularly in cutscenes) and extremely lacking in detail, the colours are washed out and dull, and the pop-up is so atrocious that it actually affects the gameplay. One time I saw three zombies standing on their own, so I charged at them with a baseball bat expecting easy kills. Imagine my surprise when I got there and was suddenly confronted by a gang of over 15 zombies! In situations where you need to use strategy and plan out your attacks to survive (which isn’t necessary in Easy mode but might be on higher difficulties), the pop-up impedes your ability to do so because you often have no idea what you’re up against until it’s too late.

Overall, I did not enjoy Dead Rising at all. It feels so clunky, is so boring, and is just the same thing again and again. Funnily enough, that sentence was used by PrattP to describe a PS2 game called God Hand (which is utter bull, because God Hand is a masterpiece of precision gaming and thrilling battles that require skill ), and the only reason why I’m quoting it here is because it describes Dead Rising in a manner where I couldn’t have said it better myself. Simply put, this game contains no variety, and even if it did, the horrible game design would have dragged it down to mediocrity. It’s a boring, lazy, un-intuitive game that should be avoided by everyone at all costs, especially when there are similar but far superior titles such as MadWorld and Resident Evil 4 available on the Wii.

By Mr_M

The Verdict

Graphics: E+

If this game was on the Nintendo 64 the graphics would still be bad.

Sound: B-

A mixed bag, but overall a highlight of the game.

Gameplay: E+

Battle poor controls to complete terrible missions and fight ridiculously bad bosses. Killing zombies is fun for a while, but the novelty wears off really quickly.

Overall: E-

One of the worst games on the Wii. Avoid it like a plague of zombies!