Sunday, October 25, 2009

Level Up: Dead Rising: Chop til you Drop



What could be more fun than being locked a mall and being able to use anything you get your hands on? How about being locked in a Zombie filled mall and having to use anything you can get your hands on to kill them! Enter the simple yet awesome concept of Dead Rising.

Dead Rising: Chop til you Drop is a Wii port of the original X-Box title. There are differences between the two titles, but most are only noticeable if you are quite familiar with the original. The most noticeable one is the lack of the 3 day time limit. But, we aren’t here to compare, so let’s move on.

The story of Dead Rising goes that you are Frank West, a gung-ho photo journalist hell bent on finding out what is going on at the small town of Willamette, Colorado. He hires a helicopter pilot to bring him to the mall, where most of the ruckus is happening, and tells him to pick him up in 3 days. There he finds out the disturbing truth: the town has been turned into Zombies! But this isn’t enough for Frank, he has to find out what has happened and why. Between Zombie killing fun, you’ll dive deeper and deeper into this mystery.

“Zombies in a mall” has been done before in Night of the Living Dead. In that movie it was used as a sociological statement about consumerism. This game seems keeps that statement, but it also adds its own into the mix, modernizing it a bit. You clue onto it rather easily (they say a good part of it at one point), but I don’t want to give it away (I got to get you to play the game, one way or another).

The gameplay is pretty basic: you either grab something and hit the zombies with it, or grab a gun and shoot the zombies with it. The way you finish them off depends on the item your holding: you can knock their heads off with a bat, use a sword to slice em in half or grab a lawnmower and... (blood splatters effect) Yeah... You can keep things easy and stick with one awesome weapon, but with the amount of killing you’ll have to do, this might make the gameplay as mindless as the zombies you’re smashing.

Now let’s talk about using your guns. As you’d expect, you use your wii-mote to point and shoot who you want. I just have one problem with this: you can’t shoot while moving. You press and hold B, Frank stands still, then you aim and shoot with A. Why not make it so you can point and shoot at any point just using B as the trigger?

The missions in the game are pretty basic too: find blank person in the blank store and bring him back safely. Exceptions for missions that are important to the story. There are also boss battles that can offer a pretty good challenge, you can level up Frank by destroying the undead and completing mission and upgrade your weapons by finding some cash. These things keep the game from getting monotonous.

The story is classic zombie mayhem with classic zombie symbolism. The game is fun for random carnage, but just can get boring if you don’t mix it up yourself. All and all, it’s pretty a pretty cool game. My advice is not to take this game too seriously and just take it for what it is: an excuse for zombie killing!

Oh! One more thing I can’t forget to tell you, and this makes the game a lot easier is- *Zombies bust through the door* Whoa! Gotta use the mic here! *Mic thumping, blood splatter, fades out*

Notes: Sorry for being a day late with this post. This might effect posting up the Things I Like for this week too, but I don't know yet, we'll see how the rest of this day goes. Also, I'm working on getting the Mp3 version of this review for you guys, but Julie and I haven't quite set up my account yet, so just hang tight.

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