I never enjoyed horror. Why would I want to engage with media specifically designed to make me anxious and uncomfortable? Not my bag, sorry. Thankfully, zombies often bring the perfect mesh of horror and goofiness that makes the genre far more easy to get into. Telltale’s The Walking Dead, for example, lets you into a world where the horror isn’t in the immediate terror, but rather lies in the interpersonal tension and the fear of assimilation into the mass.
Dead Rising doesn’t use zombies in this way. It doesn’t make you question the human condition and the essence of what it is to be alive. No, Dead Rising puts you in a shopping mall and fills it with the undead and a whole pile of toys with which to kill them.