If you've ever watched George A. Romero's masterful 1978 zombie film Dawn of the Dead, you've probably been waiting for a game that allows you to lay waste to a shopping mall full of zombies en masse. Dead Rising is just such a game; a violent, absurd, thoroughly irresponsible game that's exceedingly simple, but extremely fun as a result.

The game pits you as Frank West, a regular Joe who arrives at a mall that is overrun with thousands of the living dead. He arms up with whatever he can find lying around the mall to take down the zombies with, be it a garden pitchfork or a lawnmower. The game has a loose storyline but really it's quite inconsequential: the goal is to survive the invasion for 3 days (which equates to about six hours of play), using whatever means possible to destroy as many of the zombies as you can.

That's all the game is about - killing zombies - and those expecting any depth are going to want to return to Capcom's better known Resident Evil games. This is a totally absurd, careles, B-movie esque game that has no pretensions to a nuanced story and is just concerned with having you eviscerate a fleet of zombies in some incredibly horrific and imaginative ways. My personal favourite is the ability to use a huge pneumatic drill which can be bored through a zombie, and then used to fling them around. Also, you can comandeer vehicles and make a rather glorious mess of the zombies.

There is one major drawback, and that's that you can only operate one save file at once, yet given that I was expecting to find the game boring after a while, I was impressed that it held my attention throughout. This isn't high-art, but it is extremely fun and well worth adding to your collection.