Let's start with the obvious; Dead Rising is not a bad game at all, in fact, I think it was pretty good. That said, I hated this game intensely.

The premise is simple; The player is a photographer/journalist named Frank West, who finds himself trapped in a small city shopping mall overrun with zombies. It's a cool setup that sounds like it has a lot of promise. What I thought I would get would be an endurance test of zombie survival in a playground of shops with all kinds of weapons and goodies at my disposal. What I got was an arcade-like series of escort missions with the dumbest AI I've ever experienced, and a lot of button mashing.

It wasn't that the AI was practically bad, it was that it was functionally bad. As Frank rescues survivors they will often inexplicably go running into danger, then back again. Fear is a factor, some will freeze up and cower as zombies come to nosh, and I get that this reflects classic horror movie zombie fodder that do the same thing. The problem is what happens when they are moving.

NPCs will ram into walls, get stuck on obstacles, ram into one another repeatedly like The Three Stooges in a panic, kill one another if armed, go the wrong direction, get stuck behind counters, get stuck on a curb and glitch into a perpetual falling animation, require hand holding only to not hold Frank's hand; and on and on.

All of this while a time ticks down on some other needed task, wasting a tremendous amount of time, causing other missions (or Scoops) to fail. It is frustrating, and takes a massive amount of patience by the player to put up with.

My other, even bigger gripe is the combat.

I thought that in a shopping mall there would be a lot of great items to use to fight off zombies, but there weren't. Most of the items are gag items, and most of them do nothing helpful. Some items have a special attack, like the golf club or bucket, but they can often be trivial, leaving guns, knives and benches as the most useful weapons.

Frank also level's up, which can unlock a plethora of skills and bonuses that are very helpful for survival. The problem with these is that they are sometimes full of long animations, and with those timers burning down they add up very quickly to a missed scoop.

Probably the worst part about the combat are the zombies themselves. You don't just take damage, they grapple, and they grapple A LOT. When a Zombie grabs hold you may or may not get a quick time event to break free; if you don't it is often a matter of stick wriggling or button mashing to shake them off. And as soon as you do, another grapples, and then another will when that one is off. It gets tiresome and frustrating mashing buttons to shake off zombies, and this is at least half the challenge in this game. Have someone calling out for help? Sorry shaking off zombies. Gotta get that Scoop? Sorry shaking off zombies. Trying to answer another annoying Otis call? Sorry shaking off zombies, and will have to go through the call again, not only in its entirety, but with an additional “why did you cut me off” speech.

And this is really what the game became, and why I hated playing it. Grapple breaking by mashing buttons or putting in button prompts. It wasn't hard, but it was tedious. I wasn't looking for Resident Evil, but wasn't looking for a grapple breaking button masher either.

The game was played on an ultra-wide display at 3440x1440, max setting, and no serious issues (menu and dialogue boxes were 16:9, and cross-hairs looks odd).

Pros:

• Controller friendly
  
• Good graphics
  
• Funny moments
  
• Interesting characters
  
• Plenty to explore
  

Cons:

• Exploration mostly pointless
  
• Can't use everything in the mall
  
• Stun locking enemies
  
• Not enough funny moments
  
• Button mashing combat
  
• SHUT UP, OTIS!

Verdict: 4/10

This is the best game I've ever hated. It isn't bad, it just isn't for me.