Pros: Trapped with zombies. Lots of fun things to kill them with.
Cons: Sub-par save system, slightly confusing difficulty levels, occasional tacky bosses.
The bottom line: Despite some flaws, it's still a great addition to the zombie genre. If you like zombies and/or violence, you'll probably like this one.
When I first heard about Dead Rising I got pretty excited. Being trapped in a huge mall with a few thousand zombies sounded like a pretty sweet way to spend a weekend. However, there were a few things that kept this game from being as awesome as I hoped. It was not without its good points though.

The game starts with you in a helicopter over the small town of Willamette. You're Frank West, a free-lance photographer who thinks he's found the story of a lifetime. (Incidentally, you have.) While it's not obvious to Frank and his pilot what's happened, to the player it will be pretty obvious that the people wandering the streets are zombies, not rioters. After touring the town by air, you land on the mall roof and make your entrance. The pilot agrees to come back in seventy-two hours, so you must be back on the roof by then. (Seventy-two hours game time is much faster than seventy-two hours real time.) Once you enter the mall, you'll come across some people who've barricaded themselves inside. It's not long before a lady looking for her dog breaks the barricade, allowing zombies to flood into the mall.

Instead of zombie infestation on a global scale, Dead Rising localizes the zombies to only the small town of Willamette. There's a reason they're localized, and the concept behind the whole thing is actually pretty cool. But I'm not going to spoil that for you.

After you make it back to the safe room, there are some introductions and cut scenes, and pretty soon you'll be on your own to explore the mall. It's more or less a sandbox game. You can wander around killing zombies or rescuing civilians. You can use almost anything you can find as weapons. There are the more traditional weapons like guns, crowbars, and chainsaws, but there are also less obvious choices like soda cans, benches, shower heads, and stacks of CDs. Some of these are less effective, but heck if pelting zombies with soda cans isn't fun. You can also spit on the zombies. It doesn't do any good, but it's an amusing feature. For a small town mall, this place is ridiculously huge and full of nifty stuff. There's a gun shop, as well as a blade shop where you can pick up a katana, and of course, a food court. Frank will need food to recharge his health if he's injured. Wine will heal him fully. As you level up you'll have more spaces in your inventory to carry extra food and weapons. Frank can also change his outfit at most clothing stores in the game. You might find this handy later in the game, because there's a group of cultists that will try to knock you unconscious and leave you in a back room without your clothes.

Some of the missions in the game are required to move the story along, others simply stay open for a certain amount of time before disappearing. The story related ones say they have an unlimited amount of time, but this is somewhat inaccurate. If you don't complete your current mission by the time the next mission is supposed to start, the truth will be lost forever and you won't be able to complete the story. At this point you can either finish out your three days in the mall and gain a few more levels before your next go, or you can simply start over at your current level.

Frank also has a communicator, which he must answer in order to hear about the various rescue missions. The communicator was poorly executed. When you answer, a small text box pops up. The text is hard to read, and there's no voice acting for this. While you're on the communicator, you can't attack the zombies, and there's no way to speed up the conversation. So basically you'll be running around on your phone, ducking zombies and trying to read the tiny text. Fortunately you can get a recap of the mission in your mission log.

Any changes you make to the environment will not be saved once you leave the room. The downside of this is that you can't clear the mall of zombies in order to make rescue missions a lot easier. No, rescue missions will inevitably have you escorting scared (and often kind of stupid) civilians back to the safe room through crowds of undead. The bright side is that you'll never have a shortage of food and weapons. Also, zombie cops generally spawn in the same areas, so keep that in mind when you go looking for a gun.

You'll be facing down more than just zombies though. Most of the boss battles are with humans, though I found some of these to be a bit... flimsy and weird for my tastes. Some of the game features get pretty ridiculous. Zombies? Of course. Escaped prisoners? Definitely. Crazy cultists? Totally. Random nut cases? Yep. Crazed overweight lesbian cop holding hot chicks prisoner? I suppose. Insane clown with chainsaws? Er... Not so much. I kinda wish they'd thought of a flimsy pretext to have more zombie bosses, because the zombies are probably what most people came for.

You'll remember I mentioned that Frank is a photojournalist. Despite the fact that he's getting more than he bargained for, he still wants to get the scoop on Willamette. Meaning you get to take pictures of the zombies and various events going on. Doing so will help Frank level up, but after a certain amount of shots you'll need to find a place in the mall to recharge the camera. There are different types of photo ops, including drama, horror, and outtake.

The save features in this game were a bit wonky. There weren't that many places to save, and it's really easy to die unexpectedly. When I say unexpectedly, I mean that sometimes I could be surrounded by zombies, wailing away at one with my trusty dumbbell and not get bitten by any of them. Other times I could go near a single zombie and have it start chowing down on my face. So I felt like it was pretty hard to judge how dangerous a situation I'd be getting myself into. The save features also had an option to “Save state and restart”. I selected this once not realizing it would restart my entire game, with my character at the level he was when I selected it. Because of this option to start the game at a higher level, it seemed like the game did not know what it was doing as far as difficulty. There were some missions that I was almost positive could not be completed in my first play. Yet another way to die unexpectedly.

Even so, if you pick it up used it's well worth the money. Beating the heck out of zombies with any object you can lay your hands on is always entertaining. Running through a crowd of undead with a chainsaw is pretty sweet too.

Dead Rising is rated M for Mature because of blood and gore, intense violence, language, partial nudity, and use of alcohol. It requires 4.5MB to save. So far, X-Box Live features downloadable content in the form of keys to lockers in the safe room, which will give Frank more outfits.