Dead Rising

Aug. 9, 2008

On the recommendation of a someone, I decided to take a look at Dead Rising. I know this game made a big splash a few years ago, it's time I saw what it was all about.

I found it infuriating on so many different levels.

Category

Survival Sandbox

Pros

• When the game let me loose on zombies, I had fun going around and whacking them with a lead pipe. (Until the game decided the lead pipe was broken.)

Cons

• It took me 30 minutes. 30 fucking minutes. To get to the core content of the game. When all you have is one hour, that is unacceptable.
• Loading. Loading. Loading. Loading. Loading.
• I have issues with games that make you purposely lose. Especially when they're trying to teach you game mechanics at the same time! How am I supposed to learn how to wield weapons when I'm *supposed* to be overridden by zombies?
• Blunt weapons do not have a lifespan. I don't care how many times I use a lead pipe, it's not going to break. Especialy not after about 30 whacks. This game mechanic angers me.
• The built-in tutorial completely glossed over everything I actually wanted to know. It was getting into the nitty gritty of story game mechanics when all I wanted to know was, say, how to AIM MY GUN.
• I came across my first "boss fight" pretty quickly. You have to aim at the boss to kill him. Which the game didn't tell me how to do. I eventually figured it out after wasting tons of my ammo, only to discover the game wasn't going to assist me at all on aiming. I can't aim with a joystick, and I was almost out of health anyways (and the game didn't tell me how to find health), so I died.
• Zero checkpoint system. Go back to your last save. More on that in the verdict.

Verdict

I died, and the game presents no option of "go back to the last checkpoint." Instead I got sent all the way back to my first save point... that I did about 20 minutes into the cutscene heavy intro. There was no point for me to play the last 15 minutes of my hour on this, since I'd just be rehashing everything I already did.

This game certainly seems designed for play once you fully learn the system. In the hour I had, I could not fully learn the system. As a result, the first hour sucked.

Is it worth playing more to discover the potential goodness inside? I don't know. To relate this to a movie, would you walk out of the theatre if the first 30 minutes of a two hour film sucked? There seems to be this strange philosophy with games that it's acceptable to make a player suffer until they "get it." In other words, there's too little emphasis on bootstrapping the player for the system.

Ultimately, I do not think I'd play this game more based on the little I got to see. I'd only be doing it to give the game the benefit of the doubt.