George Romero has taught me a lot of life lessons over the years, but undoubtedly the most important one is that when the zombies inevitably attack, I need to go hole up in a shopping mall. That and I better watch out for my fellow man, because they always seem to cause more problems than even the shuffling hordes do. Naturally turning a mall into your impenetrable fortress against zombies is a great idea for a video game, but Romero’s intellectual property has never been used to make any games aside from a single mediocre FPS based on Land of the Dead. Capcom loves them some zombies though, and didn’t hesitate to try out their own take on the concept way back before all the 360’s of the world began succumbing to the Red Ring of Death. Following time honored tradition, Capcom now presents us with yet another Wii port of a 3 year old game: Dead Rising: Chop Til You Drop.
In Dead Rising you take the role of Frank West, a freelance photojournalist who flies via helicopter into a small town that has been closed off by the National Guard. It doesn’t take Frank long to see that the town has a serious zombie problem and so he asks the chopper pilot to drop him off at the town’s mall and return to pick him up in 3 days. The mall is quickly overrun, and Frank spends his time trying to discover the cause of the outbreak while saving the few human survivors left throughout the mall. The original 360 version gave players a strict time limit that made it exceptionally difficult to save all of the survivors and also follow the story to the end in a single run through the game. This led to some tough decisions that at least for me made the game a deeper experience. Is finding the truth really worth letting that old lady die? Should I risk the lives of the three survivors I’m escorting on the slim chance that I might be able to save one more? This time around Capcom has chosen the get rid of the time limit so that players will be able to play the game to its conclusion no matter what. Each escort mission is now ranked based on how quickly you complete it and rewards and secret missions are unlocked for achieving high ranks. The incentive to complete missions quickly is still there, but the moral implications of your actions have been lost in the process.
CtyD is all about the shooting
Despite this CtyD isn’t nearly as lazy of a port as you might expect; in fact it’s much closer to a remake than anything else. It might just be the nature of porting a 360 game that can have hundreds enemies on screen at once to a vastly inferior (technically speaking) console, but the general gameplay has been changed immensely. The original had a freely controlled camera and allowed the player to jump around and explore the mall as they saw fit. The zombies were so numerous that it was almost pointless to fight them, so most of your time was spent weaving through the crowds, or in some cases crawling on top of their heads. All weapons in the game broke quickly, and guns were not only scarce but were also discarded once they ran out of ammunition so the end result was a game with lots of freedom of movement that emphasized avoiding conflict whenever possible.
CtyD on the other hand focuses almost exclusively on gun based combat. It adopts the excellent Resident Evil 4 game engine to help it with this task and because of this the shooting controls are some of the best you will encounter not only on the Wii, but in this generation of consoles as a whole. By holding down the trigger on the Wii remote Frank will draw whatever gun he has equipped, and from there you can point and shoot any enemy on the screen just like in a light gun title. You can also move the camera with the analogue stick to pick off enemies outside of your current field of vision. The concept is very simple, but nonetheless it far exceeds the quality of traditional dual analogue shooting controls. Much like RE4 headshots are the way to go, and when you score one the enemy will be temporarily stunned so Frank can go in for a special finishing attack that can change depending on what melee weapon he has equipped. These finishers also make good use of the Wii motion controls; nothing feels better than punching the remote forward to see a zombie end in a bloody mess. The melee weapons have two attacks, your typical strike is performed by simply hitting the A button, and you can also perform a heavy strike by swinging the remote. However, despite how responsive the motion controls were pretty much everywhere else in the game, I was quite annoyed by the many times that I had a heavy melee strike fail to register at an important moment.
The zombie hordes are a bit thinner on the Wii
The spectacular new combat engine comes at a price though. Unsurprisingly the Wii version of Dead Rising features less zombies than the 360 game, although compared to most titles there are still quite a lot of enemies surrounding you pretty much all the time. Combined with the new combat system the game would almost certainly be too easy without some changes. You’ll notice the first change pretty much the moment the zombies break through the mall’s barricade; these zombies are much more violent than those found in the 360 title. Where before the zombies tended to just stand around in a daze, now they run at you, grab you, and slash at you absolutely every chance they get. Once they notice you they will follow you until you either outrun them or kill them so in general you have to fight more often than you avoid enemies. The second change is the addition of new enemies, in the form of poodle, parrot, Kent, Jo, and Cliff zombies. The latter three are bosses from the original that have been turned into normal enemies in CtyD. Now while I will say that having more enemy variation does keep combat from getting stale I must also say that the designs themselves shouldn’t have been so ridiculous. The original version of Dead Rising was light hearted but still stayed in the realm of believability, much like the film from which it draws inspiration. Enemies included normal zombies, cultists, Special Forces members, and human psychopaths for bosses, all of which were pretty believable given the context of the story. Zombie parrots and poodles though? A zombie that throws grenades and takes pictures of you?! Maybe if they threw in some other kinds of dogs and crows or something the animal zombies would have been a little more believable, but they just seem more goofy than anything as it is. Did I mention that the parrots drop grenades on you? Where the hell do parrots even get grenades from?!
More importantly the bigger price of the new combat system is a lack of freedom. Since the game uses RE style “tank” controls there is no longer the option to jump, so that alone removes a lot of the freedom of exploration. There isn’t much reason for it in my eyes either, since you could have easily used RE4’s weapon aiming system without losing the full analogue movement and ability to jump. Even more damning though are the newly erected barricades around the mall. Each area of the mall is pretty large and open so there are lots of different paths available to get where you want to go, but apparently to force you into having to fight the zombies CtyD has very set paths the player must follow to proceed through each area. This is accomplished mostly by alternate paths being blocked off by either debris, or simply having the path roped off. Aside from the ridiculous fact that Frank is apparently so lazy that he would rather walk through a horde of zombies than step over a rope, this also causes the game to become very repetitive the more you play it. The nature of the game means that you will be traversing all of the areas in the game quite often, but where in the 360 version you could accomplish that any way you wanted you will quickly fall into a set pattern in how you traverse each and every area in CtyD. The excuse that it was made like this to make you fight the zombies isn’t really relevant either, since the same thing could have been accomplished by simply spawning zombies on those pathways instead of blocking them off.
"I knew I should have stepped over those ropes..."
The mission structure doesn’t help in the freedom department either, since escort missions are now all mandatory and you are not allowed to enter the mall unless you accept a mission. I don’t even understand the reasoning behind this; it seems like Capcom removed a lot of the sand from their sandbox title. Veterans of the original must be cringing right about now remembering how idiotic the survivors were in the original title. The addition of being able to continue from the last area you entered eases things up a bit though. The survivors also seem to do a better job of sticking close to Frank, and there is no friendly fire anymore so it’s easier to save them when they get surrounded. They still aren’t the brightest around, but the escort missions are definitely preferable to those found in the 360 game.
One of Dead Rising’s more addictive points was its RPG elements and thankfully they are kept in this new version. By killing enemies and escorting survivors you gain levels which will net you new skills, item slots, increased melee weapon durability, and increased melee weapon damage. Enemies also drop money which can be used to buy upgraded ammunition cases and new guns, but there isn’t a gun upgrade system like there was in RE4 so it feels like a little bit of a missed opportunity.
The game features some pretty interesting boss characters
In addressing some of the complaints levied against the original, CtyD now features multiple save slots and a much more forgivable level of difficulty. There are three modes from the outset and Capcom did a pretty good job making easy mode easy and hard mode hard. Players will also no longer need to grind levels so much in order to complete the game, whereas the average 360 player found themselves restarting with their character countless times in order to get anywhere.
To put it quite bluntly, the graphics in the title are terrible. I didn’t expect the game to look as good as the 360 title, but I did at least expect it to look like a Wii title. The resolution seems pretty blurry, and the zombie models in particular have very bland textures. It looks a lot like how my PSP looks when I run it on my TV and that isn’t a good thing at all. More importantly though is the fact that the game’s apparent technical limitations seem to spill into the gameplay typically in the form of gutted or entirely removed boss fights. The maintinence tunnels are a joke, with hordes of similar looking zombies that don’t even move around as you drive over them, and this ultimately ruins one of the most epic boss battles in the entire game. Considering the boss battles were one of the best parts of the title it’s sad that things turned out this way. Much of the in game violence has also been toned down, although I suspect this has more to do with graphical limitations than it does with censorship. You can still decapitate and slice zombies in half, but the body parts disappear immediately now and some of the more extreme moves like disembowel have been toned down so that you no longer actually disembowel them anymore. Also likely due to the lack of a good storage device on the Wii, our photojournalist friend neglects to actually take any photos during his trip. At least the music is still good, the mix of elevator music and hard rock for the boss fights sounds just as good now as it ever did.
The violence has been toned down a bit
In the end Dead Rising: Chop Til You Drop was really a missed opportunity for Capcom. Graphical limitations aside had they merely added in the new gun combat and other features but left the game’s original freedom of movement and choice in they could have ended up with one of the best titles on the Wii. Nevertheless the game is still a very fun title for the Wii and while I wouldn’t recommend it over the 360 version it’s a solid buy if you don’t own a 360. I guess the “zombies in the mall” concept is just really hard to screw up. As a big fan of the original I did enjoy playing through a very new take on the game, but I must say that wasted potential always feels worse than playing a game that that had no potential in the first place.
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7.9