So over the last few days I played and finished Dead Rising on the 360. I have to say that I enjoyed the game a lot. I had played part of it before but there are some seriously cool twists and turns that I wasn’t expecting and that was a lot of fun.

That being said, even with something that was really the first of its kind in a way, the game has flaws and some of them are pretty major.

I say finished because if the player doesn’t complete the Case 2-3 mission immediately and instead goes and saves a bunch of people, when 2-3 is finally finished, all of the following missions will be automatically failed due to time. This wouldn’t be a big deal if they told you that Case 2-3 needed to be finished immediately. They don’t. In every other instance they tell you when something needs to be done, but for 2-3, the game tells you to take your time. The game fucks you.

There doesn’t seem to be a good reason for this except that you probably want to bulk up your character (Frank) the first time you play and get used to running around and knowing the stores in the mall. That way when you’re in a rush to do all of the case missions, you know where you’re going.

Sure. I get that. BUT:

Why does the player need to be tricked/cheated into doing this? That seems crummy at best. I get the good intentions, but I wound up saving a ton of people only to find out that I should have completed the main missions sooner. Except by this point I wasn’t a few hours in like some people who find themselves in this position - I was almost done. There isn’t really an easy way to create multiple saves, so I’d have to start over. And to start over where I was would mean to basically play the entire game again. Don’t get me wrong: I wanted to find out what the truth was behind all of this, but enough to play all over? Maybe later…

The ending I received WAS an ending, but it was pretty weak - if they were going to make it so easy to fail (and they did), they should have accounted for that and made a better bad ending.

As it stands I just got told what I already knew, which was that I didn’t finish the mission cases, but then nothing else really happened. There was no hint of what I failed to learn, no “Good job!” for getting so many survivors out of the mall, no “You failed, so here’s your character being turned into a zombie!”, just a short cut scene and some text.

Even more bizarre was once I had failed all of the cases, I was so far along that certain things started disappearing and with 12 hours left (in-game clock) I no longer had any scoops to deal with or people to save so I just waited. I know I failed and was supposed to restart, but even when the player fails, waiting for the game to end should never be an option. Boo.

Now don’t get me wrong. I still really liked this game and I will probably come back and replay it and get my info (if for no other reason than Dead Rising 2 is on my list for this year and I’d like to know the Dead Rising story), but these are pretty big oversights in my opinion. Cheating to get people to play more hours of your game than really necessary feels… Well, it feels like cheating.

The only other gripe I have about the game is the way that people follow you. It’s really bad. You’ll hand someone a katana and they somehow still manage to get trapped by every group of zombies you pass, but pick someone up and carry them on your shoulders and you’ll never be touched! It got to the point that I hoped people would need to be carried because trying to get them back by fighting was just a lost cause.

Anyway, it’s a really great idea for a game, the time-sensitive stuff was fun, only getting one save was cool until it fucked me, and there were so many fun surprises along the way that I can’t be too mad at what was ultimately a pretty kickass experience.

In short: Play the game, but the second you see a case - go play it. 

Sixty left!

Oh, and if I had a username based on this game it would be “FuckOffOtis” because seriously, that dude needs to leave you alone. Seriously.