The hottest next generation feature isn't basketball players sweating, bump mapping, or realistic skin textures. It's all about taking a single scene and jamming as many dudes into it as you possibly can. This is why Rare continuously demos that one Kameo battle scene where there's thousands of monsters beating the hell out of one another, but that's not the only game that's main draw is utter chaos. Capcom's monster mash, Dead Rising, is another exquisitely attractive Xbox 360 title but this one has nothing to do with fairies and enchanted woods. It's all about zombies, lots of rotting corpses that feed on...snack on...BBBRRRRAINNNSSSS.

Much like both Dawn of the Dead films, what I've seen of Dead Rising takes place in a shopping mall. You play as a journalist named Frank who's risking his life to get the big scoop on this zombie invasion, and while the game has objectives and you get to interact with humans, the primary goal is to just slaughter as many zombies as possible. The two biggest draws is the developers' ability to just clog the screen with walking corpses as well as useful items/weapons that can be used to bludgeon the hell out of everyone including your compatriots. So really, the game appears to be nothing more than one huge battle royal where you can either just bash in skulls with baseball bats or use your imagination and come up with more dastardly ways to kill your opponents.

The mall is comprised of numerous stores and all of them seem to contain signature weapons, so you'll come across different toys in the hardware store versus the supermarket. The list, which appears to be pretty damn extensive, consists of the usual assortment of pistols, shotguns, and automatic rifles, but then there's pipes, bats, a lawnmower that allows you to murder enemies Dead Alive style, a propane tank (toss it into a crowd and then blast it), a garbage can, a pail, a chainsaw, a cash register, and a host of other cool stuff.

Aside from all of the carnage there are also standard objectives that you can complete after meeting up with the still human people in the game. Or, you can just cut their heads off. That's entirely up to you, but I don't think you'll be able to lose sight of why you've stuck yourself in this mess in the first place, that goal being to snap some shots of the mayhem so you can make thousands of dollars off your exclusive story and sell all of the photos to some rag. With that being said, there are supposedly some serious, moral choices that you'll need to make. Do you let that poor, innocent girl get her chest ripped open by a monster just for the sake of taking the best picture in the history of pictures or will you save the day, lop off the zombie's head with a shovel and deliver her from evil?

I'm not exactly sure how far along this game is so it would be unfair to say that it's not visually on par with games like Oblivion or Kameo, but it's not visually on par with games like Oblivion or Kameo, though that doesn't mean that it's bad looking. The fact that there are so many zombies on screen is just a delight to see, and the other fact, that they can all be dismembered and crushed with weapons, makes Dead Rising look sweeter than an Oreo cookie dipped in caramel. I'm quite fond of this game's appearance, especially the blood, which is just extremely realistic looking.

Dead Rising appears to be the perfect game for players who don't want to think too hard, and to that I say, bring it on! There's nothing I'd rather do after a long, hard days work than hop onto a comfy couch and saw zombies in half, and that's why this title is at the very top of my must buy list. Hopefully, Capcom will allow GameDaily to shamble over to a kiosk and get some serious hands on time with this game in the very near future, lest we snack on Mega Man's brains and spit bolts into a bathtub.