Dead Rising Mobile Game Review

I had high hopes for Dead Rising Mobile thanks to loving the console versions and zombies on the whole. Dead Rising Mobile certainly feels ambitious at first, offering some attractive cutscenes and what initially feels like a miniaturised version of the original Dead Rising. Unfortunately the more I play, the more I realize that Dead Rising Mobile is seriously lacking in satisfaction.

In this game, you play everyone’s favourite zombie hunter, Frank West, as he runs around completing errands and killing zombies. There’s no sign of a storyline to keep you enticed, instead you rely solely on being asked to complete errands by various people. At first, this seems fine but it quickly becomes repetitive. Running back and forth simply to collect strange items that seem to bear no relevance to the zombie invasion gets old fast especially with the lack of conversations to add context.

Zombies aren’t very hard to kill here either. There’s never a huge amount to be seen, presumably because of the hardware limitations, so you never feel overwhelmed. Even punching them to death isn’t hard to do although obviously the satisfaction lies in acquiring different items to kill them such as the humble bat and lawnmower. Mad zombies also exist here which provide more challenging battles thanks to being much more aggressive and robust. There’s also the additional constraint of hunger. If Frank gets too hungry, he loses health, so you have to keep him regularly fed. This is also something that becomes quickly irritating.

Controls work well via a virtual d-pad and one button for the right thumb which doubles up as the interact button and attack button. There are no camera controls but it doesn’t take long to accept this and to be fair, the console iterations aren’t known for their amazing controls.

The typical Dead Rising levelling up mechanism is still here but if you die, the only way you can retain your level and item is to request help from your friends. This is done via Twitter or Facebook. It’s an interesting concept but if you have no friends who also play this game, you’re rather stuck as you’re then doomed to lose your level and items upon each death.

The main failing for Dead Rising Mobile is that it just isn’t interesting enough. It’ll be fun at first completing various errands and gaining achievements for doing so but you’ll quickly tire of it and long for a bit more logic behind what you’re being asked to do. There’s certainly potential here but the kind that you’ll forget far too quickly.