It had to happen at some point, someone had to make a game based on Dawn of the Dead. Trapped in a mall with thousands of zombies roaming around in search of fresh human flesh. I can’t think of a better developer to pull this idea off than Capcom; their Resident Evil series has carved a niche all for itself, and the most recent (Resident Evil 4) is regarded as one of the best games of its generation. In comes Dead Rising.

I think only now with the power and performance of a “next generation” machine is this game possible. You simply could not have done this game on a current gen machine such as Xbox or PlayStation2, so Dead Rising for me really is the first proper next-generation game on Xbox 360, doing something that was simply not possible before.

Armed with simply a camera, and the ability to pick-up and use many, many items in the mall you have the choice of playing the game in a variety of ways. Dead Rising plays in a similar way to Grand Theft Auto; you have this huge area, with lots of missions and objectives to complete, and a story to play through, but if you don’t want to do them, you don’t have to. You could simply mess around throwing CDs at zombies all day if you wanted to, or grab a car (or skateboard, shopping cart, motorbike, bicycle, van, or jeep) and have a drive in the park, maintenance tunnels, or the mall itself. However the kicker is that the game is split into ‘Case Files’. These form the story to the game, and if you want to know what the story is about and why it’s all happened, then you do have to follow them, and you do have to be at the right place and the right time to be able to start and complete them. But again, you don’t have to do them if you don’t want to. So it's a kind of open-ended and freeform, whilst still being a story-based adventure game - or something.

Dead Rising features an accelerated time system, where one game minute equates to about 5 seconds in the real world. The game ends after 72 game hours, so each play through will last roughly 6 hours. The game has a complete day and night cycle, which is really well done. If you stand still you can see the game getting gradually darker, and at night the mall is completely dark, and the zombies are much more aggressive too. Then the timer on the lighting system in the mall switches off, and it gets even darker and the atmosphere becomes quite menacing, uncomfortable and eerie.

The character leveling works in conjunction with the replaying of the game. As previously mentioned, you do not have to complete the Case Files if you don’t want to. At the point of missing one, you’re given three options: Reload Save, Continue the game, or Restart from the beginning. The obvious choice is to reload the save, but if you spend ages messing around, then saved the game, and then you ran out of time, there is no way to go back to a previous point in the game – there is only one save slot given. If you re-enter the game you can carry on messing around making the time up until the chopper comes on the third day, but of course doing this, you won’t find any more story information so you wont get a decent ending. The third option is an interesting one. If you restart the game, you take over your leveled up version of Frank, so when you begin you have a much higher leveled up character, making it much easier to progress through the early parts of the game which might have previously given you problems. The same goes if you die. You can either reload the game, or begin again with your leveled-up Frank. It works really well, and the game has been deliberately made like this so you do restart multiple times. At first I thought it might be annoying, but it’s really not.

It’s really quite an unusual trait in a game, to encourage you to quit out and start again, I have never come across anything like that before, and from taking a look on Internet forums regarding the game, it seems most other players haven’t either. Surprisingly it does work though, and I was never annoyed when faced with the prospect of restarting as a result of dying. I could of reloaded but I chose to restart to help build up Frank’s level, and it's a really good idea to do that.

Of course one of the best parts of the game are the items you can use as weapons to harm and kill the zombies. Ranging from handbags, teddy bears and orange juice cartons, to LCD TVs, chainsaws, plant pots, electric guitars and meat cleavers. There are literally hundreds of items in the game that can be used as weapons, and they all have their own character, animations, and secondary attacks. The chainsaw is fantastic for running through a group of zombies and chopping them up, where as other weapons have a more comical element attached to them over a real advantage to taken hoards of zombies. Traditional weapons such as Uzis, 9mm handguns, and shotguns are included in the game, but thankfully they aren’t really that effective, so the game encourages the player to be a bit more imaginative about how they take zombies out. And what’s fun about a gun when you can use a lawn mower to kill a zombie? At many points during the game I felt like Bruce Willis did in Pulp Fiction when he was in the hardware store going through all the weapons; Knife, no baseball bat, ohh chainsaw!, no wait, a hedge trimmer.. Then you spot the battle-axe sitting on a shelf and equip that instead.

There are a surprising amount of different areas for what is a shopping mall. From the movie theatre with its neon lights, dark carpets and large posters, to the shiny tiled floor of the supermarket. The meat processing plant underneath the supermarket is disgusting, with a real gritty, murky look to it, with cow carcasses hanging up ready to be chopped up, and a huge swarm of zombies surrounding them. The park in the centre of the mall is cool too, with a large lake, loads of trees surrounding it, and a variety of vehicles to drive around.

Capcom being Capcom have gone to town with boss fights, and they are all very interesting characters and they all have pretty unique patterns and attacks too. Some are part of the main Case Files, whereas others are side missions, which you might miss out on the first time through. This on its own gives you another reason to play through the game again. Unfortunately there are couple of annoyances with some of the boss fights, where if you get knocked to the floor sometimes as soon as you stand up you getting knocked down again, which can get rather frustrating.