When Resident Evil was first released for the Playstation in 1996, it was cited by many as creating a brand new genre ’Survival Horror’. For many years this has been a sore point for quite a few people as Infogrames own Alone in the Dark for the PC did something very similar to Resi on it’s release in 1992. But as well as adapting the gameplay of Alone in the Dark, Capcom also borrowed a few ideas from a classic horror movie for Resident Evil as well. With zombies lurking in an abandoned country house it was easy to assume that the folks at Capcom had seen Night of the Living Dead once or twice. Fast forward 10 years and with their first major release for the Xbox 360, Dead Rising, it looks like Capcom has been taking notes whilst watching the sequel to that film, Dawn of the Dead.

Set in a massive American mall, Dead Rising sees you as a photo-journalist, the game’s hero Frank, thrown into the middle of a zombie outbreak and tasked with finding out the cause of the outbreak within 72 hours. Although it protests it strongly (the games box even states that is not licensed by George Romero or the makers of Dawn of the Dead) the game clearly owes a big debt to Romero’s classic 1978 film. Even though Capcom may have pinched his ideas, its hard to see even George Romero not enjoying this game as Capcom have made arguably the finest zombie action title to date.

Before its release Dead Rising’s big selling point was how many zombies it could display on screen at once - literally hundreds. There was an uneasy feeling amongst some gamers that the game could just turn into a simple button mashing action game a la Dynasty Warriors. Thankfully this hasn’t been the case. Whilst it’s still amazing to see how many flesh eaters the game throws at you at any one time (still into the hundreds with absolutely no slow down) the zombies take second place behind the amazing Willamette Mall itself.

Capcom has created a stunningly big and believable game world for Dead Rising. With the mall divided up into seven distinct and different sections (varying from a theme park area to a large park with huge lake) there is so much to see and do that for many players their first few hours with Dead Rising will just be about exploring and messing around with the zombies. The level of interactivity in Dead Rising is truly phenominal with the player able to touch, pick up or use nearly everything in the mall. Walk into a sports store and you can put a American football helmet on, change your shoes then grab a baseball bat from the display and start cracking skulls. Anything you can interact with can be picked up or used with a simple tap of the ’B’ button. Cars are available to drive, blenders and microwave are there to make different types of food, your clothes can be changed, your hair can be dyed........the amount of options given to the player is quite staggering. Of course your main pleasure will be in finding new and interesting ways to kill the many zombies populating the mall and its here that Dead Rising certainly doesn’t disappoint. With handguns, shotguns, leadpipes and baseball bats there are many simple ways to get rid of our undead friends but for those willing to experiment there are so many more impressive and downright amusing ways to dispatch them such as lawn mower, disembowling or the ever popular shower nozzle to the head. Again all the weapons are easy and instinctive to use allowing you to concentrate on the task at hand - killing zombies in as gory a way as possible.

Just running around killing zombies is certainly a lot of fun but even that will start to get tiring after a while so what about Dead Rising’s actual plot and missions? After creating such an immersive and enjoyable game world it seems as though Capcom were loathe to channel gamers in any way so they have made a crucial design choice here. As brave and unique a decision it is, it’s arguably one that will damage some gamers’ enjoyment of the title. When Frank is dropped into the mall via helicopter he’s told that he will be picked up again in 3 days time. There is a storyline to follow but whether you do or not is left totally up to the player. It’s entirely possible for you to simply wait on the helipad for three days if you wanted. The choice is yours. It’s when you do choose to follow the storyline though that things start to go a little sour.

At the very beginning of the game Frank meets a small group of survivors and government officials in the mall’s secruity room. These are people unlucky enough to have got accidentally caught up in the zombie outbreak, as well as people wanting to find out what caused it. Given a walkie-talkie by one of these survivors Frank gets frequent ’scoop’ messages when on his travels around the mall. These scoops tell him about various missions, events and things happening around the place. These can be anything from main story missions to sightings of other survivors you can help out. These aren’t random occurances though and happen at a set time in set locations around the mall. Frank must be at each location in the set amount of time or he will miss the ’scoop’. Unfortunately this also applies to the main storyline missions and means that if you miss one deadline (the times for which, at least initially, can be very tight) you will be unable to get the true ending to the game leaving you, eventually, facing a few lines on a static ending screen telling you that you never learned ’the truth’ behind the zombie incident. This leaves you with the only other options of either restarting again from the very beginning or facing an irritating reload from your last save. Even more annoyingly players are limited to only one save slot so if you were unlucky enough to have saved too far away from your goal without enough time to get there, then you really are stuck with not being able to complete the game fully and face having to restart from scratch. It appears though that Capcom was all too aware of this and have at least attempted to soften the blow by allowing you to restart the game with a ’levelled-up’ Frank. During the game you can level Frank’s abilities in a basic RPG style. By killing zombies, saving survivors, taking photographs (he is a journalist after all) etc. you will upgrade Frank’s health, speed and power thus making future playthroughs that little bit easier. Although it’s not game-breaking by any means, this ’deadline’ system certainly is a brave departure from the normal action game template but it is one that some gamers may very well lose patience with. Frustrating just isn’t the word when 2 days into the story you accidentally spend to much time fighting off zombies before realising you’re too late to make the next deadline.

Visually, Dead Rising is one of the biggest treats available on the next gen consoles. Frank and all human characters (the still living ones, at least) all look excellent and very lifelike. We’ve already mentioned the games ability to show hundreds of zombies on screen at any one time but the quality of the zombies’ graphics is also outstanding. The zombies all look suitably mangled and horrific and move in a nice shambling stagger (thankfully none of that running rubbish from the Dawn of the Dead remake here folks). Obviously there is some repetition with the zombie models when you are in a room with a hundred of the things but most of the time you’re having too much fun bashing their heads in to care. The one and only down side here is that the game uses some ridiculously small text during cutscenes and conversations with survivors which is near impossible to see when not close to the television screen. This could definitely be a problem for anyone with sight problems.

The sound is of a good quality throughout the game with all the weapons and zombie attacks accompanied with some meaty sound effects. The noise of a hundred zombies moaning is impressive but not as much as the thunk of a bowling ball smashing a zombies skull. There are some decent, albeit slightly over-acted, voice overs but they seem to fit in nicely within the atmosphere of the game world. The mall itself also does a good line in cheesy ’muzak’ tunes which are piped around the mall but these can start to get very tiresome and irritating after hearing them repeated for the thousandth time.

It’s true that Dead Rising isn’t perfect but it also does a lot right. Its world is such a fun place  to play about in (strange considering its gory and very violent tone) that you can almost forgive its failings. It has some great gameplay and some truly memorable moments. Like Romero’s zombie films your biggest threat in Dead Rising isn’t the zombies but humans who have turned more than a little crazy and your first encounter with Jo (a morbidly obese, sado-masochistic, lesbian police woman - not joking) is one you won’t forget in a hurry. Having to redo missions and boss fights you’ve already completed is never the best experience in a game but it’s made more bearable when you’re at least having fun doing so. It won’t be to everyone’s tastes and those expecting another game similar to Resident Evil will most likely be disappointed. However it is a throughly entertaining game in its own right. Dead Rising really is the Dawn to Resi’s Night. Which you like best will probably be down to how much you like shopping malls.........