Dead Rising: Chop Til You Drop for the Wii

So if you remember from the last show, we were looking at Dead Rising on the 360. And since I had only gotten a chance to check out the demo instead of the full game, the boys had convinced me that my money would be well spent grabbing myself a copy. So much to my surprise, the Wii port ended up coming out this same week so I thought I’d give it whirl to see how it compared to the 360 version. Soooooooooo??????

Since this was made by the folks at Capcom, I expected the controls to perform similarly to the controls for the Wii port of Resident Evil 4. And they do. And that is a good thing. You use the wii-mote to aim your gun which provides a greater accuracy to your shots and also helps with the player’s immersion in the game. Its also used for quick-time events to dive out of the way of oncoming attacks. But the controls also expand on what was done with RE 4. You can also use the motion control to wave the wii-mote and lob any objects that you pick up at your targets like a vase or a TV. There are even some attacks that allow to approach an unconscious zombie with a weapon (like a baseball bat), wave the wii-mote to wind up, and swing – CRACK! Oh look at him fly!!

Now I didn’t want to go through the same old the-Wii-can’t-handle-graphics-like-the-other-systems-blah-blah-blah because we all know that. However in this case I found it made a radical difference in the gameplay. There are far fewer zombies throughout the area due to the Wii’s inability to handle too much graphical content at once and it dramatically reduces the difficulty. Kev had mentioned in his review that the opening sequences were rather difficult on the 360 version and that he had to attempt things several times. When I tried the same thing on the Wii, I waltzed right though the area only stopping to take out enough enemies to make a hole to get to my destination. At first I thought Kev was crazy, and let me be clear, he is, but when I rebooted back into my 360 demo I realized he was right. There are 2 to 3 times as many enemies to deal with and my mild mannered wii shopping centre was greatly juxtaposed to this 360 shopping mall from hell.

A lot of the interactivity with the environment has been neutered as well. Where you could walk into any store and change clothes, grab a book or find new weapons on the shelves in the 360, now you can only find a limited number of those things and even then only in select stores.

Another issue I had was with the redrawing. Often times I would take out a group of enemies, turn around to take out a couple behind me and turn around again to find new guys had sprung up out of thin air. Or I would be running down a hallway and have to stop dead in my tracks because new zombies had suddenly popped into view in front of me. It was also very predictable to find guys in the same spots repeatedly. I could always count on that same zombie with the same knife standing in the same hallway in the same spot even though I had already taken him out 27 times.

My biggest issue with this game though is their decision to remove the photography from the game. While the photography wasn’t a huge part of the 360 demo, I did want to explore it more since the main character is, you know, a photo journalist and it was obviously a fundamental part of the story. If they were going to remove the photography element, I feel they missed a great opportunity to do something different with the game. Why not play as a different character instead and get a different perspective on the same events taking place. Having Frank run around claiming to be a photo journalist while never actually taking any pictures seemed to negate the point of him being there.

But let me stress one thing. This game is still a pile of fun. Grabbing a shopping cart and mowing over hordes of zombies is extremely satisfying. As well as many of the other elements I didn’t have a chance to explore in the 360 demo such as lawnmowers, skateboards, bikes and, oh yes,  chainsaws. If you’re an owner of both systems I would definitely recommend the 360 version. But if you’re monogamous to the Wii, its hard to recommend a full purchase since its currently twice the price of its 360 counterpart. In the meantime this is absolutely worth a rental and should provide many fun hours of zombie bashing.