The latest generation of consoles afforded us unprecedented numbers of zombies, but at what cost?

THE MOST important aspect of the original Dead Rising was one of scale, as well as location: as the shopping mall set up was iconically linked with one of the greatest zombie films of all time. Zombies are undead terrors but, on the face of it, are easy to outrun and evade. So what was needed was a full scale outbreak, a sense that a veritable army of implacable foes could be lurking around every corner – ready to overwhelm you with sheer weight of numbers. The key feature was in making sure the screen was packed, wall to wall, with undead foes ready to make your every move a living nightmare.

It worked, to an extent, as up to 800 zombies could be shuffling around on screen at any given time but they never really posed too much of a threat beyond getting in the way. Part of this was down to the multitude of creative ways you could go about dismembering them, and part of it was down to the fact that the lead roles in terms of villains were still very much human. The litany of psychopaths that popped up to ruin your day were a very real threat, and made sense in the hypothetical situation of a zombie outbreak, plus they all served to push the story forward.