Dead Rising comes so close to greatness it hurts. Smashing zombies with a huge variety of skills and weapons scattered throughout a seamlessly never-ending mall is always a lot of fun but the case game structure and RPG like leveling system sadly feel out of place. Kudos to the devs at Capcom for breaking out of the mold of standard videogame structure, but while playing through Dead Rising I couldnt help but wish that the mashing was more open ended.

One of the first things youll probably notice when you start up a new game of Dead Rising is that the cutscenes are extremely well done. They actually convey an understandable story with some of the best voice work ever heard in a game. This is certainly no Xenosaga where youll be nearly falling asleep waiting for the talk to end. Its more like watching a good movie that youll most likely want to watch over and over again. I dont think Ive ever felt this way about in-game storytelling and this is probably the single greatest achievement Dead Rising has accomplished.

Then of course youll notice that there are a whole lot of zombies on screen. Unfortunately because of this overload of polygons the texturing suffered quite a bit. While faces generally look amazing, clothing and other objects look marginally washed out. Im not saying the textures are last-gen but theyre pretty close to that in some areas. Ultimately thats forgivable once you swing a guitar through a huge crowd of zombies for the first time and you witness just what the game engine has to process every frame.

Once the initial joy of destruction has subsided youll want to get into the actual core of the game which takes place over 72 hours within a mall. Each our is about 5 minutes real time and each quest known as a case requires that you be somewhere in the mall at exactly the right in-game time. While this doesnt sound to limiting it does get quite annoying when all you want to do is search around for a new object to throw or swing at the sea of undead surrounding you.