Frank starts out as a slow, generally weak guy. He doesn't have much combat experience, so that's not altogether surprising. However, the game affords you plenty of opportunities to earn prestige points, which work toward increasing Frank's abilities. Points come from a variety of things, including completing missions, getting survivors to join up with you, killing lots and lots of zombies, and even taking pictures. As Frank is a photojournalist, you can simply pick up your camera and take pictures of any number of things, from dramatic scenes to scenes of horror to periodically "erotic" moments. It's a weird mechanic, in that it's not something you really need to mess with unless you want to. Much like the food-mixing and book systems, you could probably go the entire course of the game just taking a handful of pictures and get by just fine. But as a side venture, it's a worthwhile one for the point bonuses you accrue, and the inherent weirdness of many of the photos you can take.
All this is indicative of Dead Rising's overall tone, which shirks the typical dread-based style of your average survival horror game and goes for something decidedly more like American horror cinema. The game is campy without ever venturing into parody territory. Characters don't constantly crack jokes, and the missions aren't made up of a series of sight gags. Rather, the characters take the admittedly crazy plotline completely seriously, and the missions do imbue you with a legitimate sense of danger and peril. But that danger and peril isn't based on jump scares or things that go bump in the night. It's based on the sheer difficulty of some of the missions, as well as the absurd number of zombies that the game tosses at you. There are also some subtle in-jokes toward other zombie games and movies, as well as a few pointed and amusing commentaries on American culture at large. Heck, the whole setting of the game is like a big tribute to George Romero's classic zombie thriller Dawn of the Dead, in which its characters also find themselves trapped in a mall filled with zombies. Dead Rising is decidedly lighter on the subtext than its inspirations, but there is some to be found.
What is perhaps even more interesting about Dead Rising is that its zombie killing is almost incidental in the grand scheme of the storyline. There really aren't any missions where you find yourself having to kill a certain number of zombies in a certain amount of time or anything like that. Rather, the focus of the game's missions is on the people still alive within the mall. Side missions frequently involve rescuing survivors from various areas of the mall and taking them to the safe house in the mall's security room. You'll also frequently bump up against opponent survivors, or "psychopaths," as the game calls them. These boss characters are residents of the town and employees of the mall who have been driven insane by the zombie epidemic and now are dangerous foes in their own right. As for the main case files, these follow a similar pattern, with rescue missions, combat sequences against enemy survivors, and a few fetch quests stitched together to keep the plot moving.
All the while, you'll be trying to circumvent the zombie hordes as you perform these various tasks. The zombies in this game aren't overly aggressive. They're mostly slow and will mainly just lunge at you if you get too close. There are a few distinctly different artificial intelligence routines for the zombies (some are faster and more aggressive than others), and at night, zombies become noticeably more aggressive as a whole, but more than anything else, the zombies in Dead Rising are there to provide a roadblock. They're there to prevent you from getting from point A to point B. Their sheer numbers will impede your progress in such a way that the mall essentially becomes a zombie obstacle course. This means you will have to kill thousands of zombies as the game progresses but without the caveat of being forced to kill them for tacked-on reasons.
By this design, Dead Rising keeps things moving quite nicely and manages also to keep the zombie combat from degenerating into a repetitive rut. Between the ticking clock and the amount of mission work you'll be doing, there isn't a ton of downtime (save for a few specific periods) for you to wander around, killing zombies for no reason. You can certainly do this in short bursts between most any mission, but you can't really pull a Grand Theft Auto and mill about the mall aimlessly for endless periods of time, killing indiscriminately for as long as you please--unless, of course, you simply don't care if the case-file timer runs out and are willing to reload your last save after getting your necrocide on. Then you've got all the time in the world.
That's not to say that Dead Rising completely avoids the sensation of repetitiveness. The zombie combat remains engaging throughout the entirety of the experience, but some of the missions do start to drag after a while. Specifically, the copious number of escort missions the game tosses at you gets old. The game does try to change things up a bit by setting up specific and unique scenarios for these missions. Some survivors can handle weapons and will fight alongside you, while others are too frightened and literally must have their hand held to get anywhere. Some even have to be carried due to injury (these are, by far, the most frustrating missions in the game). But it all boils down to you getting one person from harm to safety, over and over again. Fortunately, there are enough psychopath missions and other tasks to break up some of the monotony, and the majority of these missions are optional, so you could conceivably skip a lot of them. It'd be nice if there was more variety in the act of rescuing these survivors in itself, though.
One of the best things about Dead Rising is its style. This game goes for the polar opposite of what zombie games like the Resident Evil series go for, trading dark, dank, moody landscapes for bright, colorful, almost painfully pleasant-looking environments. This is a shopping mall, after all, and you'll find things like an in-mall amusement center for kids; a huge, picturesque outdoor park area; and a cheesy, Western-themed food court; as well as plenty of ridiculously themed shops all over the place. It's a delightfully contrasting world to the death and destruction that's so prevalent throughout the game. It all looks great, too. The environments are particularly sharp, as are the scads and scads of items contained within them. The character models are less impressive. Main characters like Frank and a few others in the central storyline are nicely detailed and look excellent during cutscenes, but the zombies and ancillary characters are blander and lower in overall quality. Still, the sheer number of characters onscreen at once in Dead Rising is an achievement by itself, and the game runs exceptionally smooth despite the numbers. The frame rate only really seems to hitch up when you're using particularly massive weapons against particularly big groupings of zombies, but otherwise, you'll never encounter a problem.
The audio in Dead Rising is even more impressive, thanks largely to the fantastic sound effects. The weapons in particular are top notch. Guns are appropriately booming and blades slice and dice through zombie flesh with a sickeningly awesome gushing sound. However, it's really the blunt objects that are the star of the show. Every weapon makes a totally different sound, and each one sounds exactly right. The hollow thunk made by smacking a zombie with a mannequin torso sounds just as excellent as the silly chord-strum-combined-with-loud-smacking sound of an electric guitar connecting with a zombie's skull. It's simply some of the best Foley work we've ever heard. The voice acting is also of high-quality. No actors of note play the characters, but they're each played with the right level of camp. The psychopaths are particularly amazing in their over-the-top performances. The one weak area of the audio presentation is the soundtrack, which never stands out at any point during the game. There are some appropriately tension-building bits and pieces here and there, but most of it is generic and quickly fades into the background. The sole exception to this is the random moments of goofy mall Muzak that play in certain areas, which are picture perfect for the mall atmosphere. It's just too bad there isn't more of it.
While not everything Dead Rising takes a stab at works to its benefit, it's still one of the more unique and enjoyable games on the Xbox 360. There aren't many games that give you the level of pure, bizarre variety that this game does, and its splendidly brutal yet entirely silly brand of action is too much fun to ignore. Some people are undoubtedly going to be severely put off by the constant battle between the game structure and save system, but no amount of structural missteps manage to derail this ride. It's zombie action for people who want zombie action, and it's simply a great piece of entertainment.
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