Dead Rising review

In short this video game which comes out exclusively on X-box 360 follows the story of Frank, a reporter looking to find the truth about why a random Zombie outbreak plagues a mall. If you are one of those who is determined to finish a Video game and actually follow the storyline you will see that you have to go through a series of adventures, most of them impossibly difficult, in a set amount of time. If you happen to fail your scoop chance is lost and you die. More or less. This is something I could do without. I bought the Video Game to kill Zombies and that's exactly what I do.

Ignoring the first mission they give you means that you now have free range to do whatever you feel like and therefore Frank and you can travel the mall and grab any and everything to murder these corpsy freaks. And I mean everything. I've run into baseball bats, vase's, benches, potted plants, knives, swords, paint buckets, and in some cases hunks of flesh from other Zombies. You can save people in order to level up which is actually more fun than you would think and escort them back to the primary base in the security room of the mall.

The zombies are epic. The graphics are amazing. The carnage and bloodshed is unmatched in it's realism. One can spend hours at a time blowing off steam by bashing in a zombies head with a bowling ball, or for the really angry patron who likes bloodshed you can grab an excavator and drill holes in zombies then use their body’s to kill their Zombie fellows.

The psychopaths who show up during day 2 are hilarious. You run into cultists, escaped prison inmates, freaks who think they are in Vietnam and in one case a lesbian who has kidnapped four females and is having her way with them. Swords take care of all psychopaths fairly easily.

But Zombies and psychopaths aren't the end of the fun. You can also shop for clothes if you have the time and like a good laugh (and yes, Frank wears girl clothes if you happen to find a changing booth in a woman’s store.) You can dress him in children’s clothes, he wears horse masks, feather hats, pimp suits and an array of equally hilarious items.

There are of course cars you can use to run things over with, lawn mowers, bicycles and the like. If you’re lucky you can even steal a shopping cart from a previously deceased old lady and use it to plow through the nearest Zombie hoard.

All in all the game is graphic, hilarious, a good anger management tool (angry, try killing a few thousand Zombies and see how you feel) and not so difficult to understand and play. For any fan of the gruesome I would suggest giving this game a try but for those of you who don't like violence and bloodshed, this game is NOT for you.

/ [Alexi Ice]

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