I was curious about this game for a while. I recently borrowed it from a friend of mine and was pretty disappointed. The sole saving grace is that smashing zombies with improvised weapons is pretty fun. The rest of the game sucks pus-filled zombie nuts.
Capcom is a Japanese game maker, and it shows. The controls have an unmistakable PS1 or 2 flavor to them, to the point where your action button on the 360, B, is in the same position as the circle button on the PS2 controller, while most other games use A or sometimes X as the “action” button. It’s quite common for Japanese control schemes to be somewhat awkward as it seems that game makers either don’t care about that level of polish or deliberately do it as a form of artificial difficulty. Ditto bad camera movement and fighting the game for control of the view.
Pressing and holding a bumper to target is also common in Japanese control systems, as is a swapped aiming stick. These are the same guys who did Biohazard (a.k.a. Resident Evil) on the Gamecube where you have to hold a button to aim, and you can’t maneuver at all while aiming. The reverse rotation for the lawnmower (and probably other vehicles, I didn’t get that far past that point) is also par for the course and hard to adjust to if you’re used to pretty much any other Western-made game.
The constant cutscenes are also pure Japanese. The voice acting was done in English from the beginning, but the melodrama and drawn-out pauses are pretty standard J-conventions. As are the constant interruptions, updates, new goals, sub-quests, etc. The unpredictable cutscenes pissed me off after the first couple of times, mostly because the crappy saving system makes them into yet another form of fake difficulty, forcing you to redo parts of the game if the cutscene happens when you’re low on life or haven’t found a place to save in a while. What’s really jarring about them though is that they seem to be for a completely different game than the one they’re in. The jump in style and quality is at odds with the interactive part of the game.
The saving grace of the game is the astonishing (for a Japanese game) sandbox element. Smashing zombies with dumbbells, a sledgehammer, a store mannequin, whatever you can get your hands on is damn fun. Throwing CDs and frisbees around is cool even if not very effective. Running over them with the lawnmower (when you can get it pointed the right way) and making them into undead mulch, hilarious.
That said, it doesn’t make up for the frustration in other aspects. My buddy, who is a serious gamer, said that it kind of makes him sad that Japanese games are so crappy by modern standards. Dead Rising is a prime example. The rest of the world is making increasingly grown-up games with polished interfaces and control systems, while Japan is putting out stuff that’s frustrating to play and seems full of half-baked ideas. Most of the highly-rated games in the last few years have been either wholly or partially Western-made. One “exception” would be MGS4. Kojima has said that he was strongly influenced by what Western game-makers were doing, and he actually has some non-Japanese on staff, which is not particularly common. In all, I’m glad I borrowed it instead of buying it.