The game’s downfall is its complete and utter lack of variation. The entire game is just one long process of running into the mall, avoiding or killing zombies while making your way toward a survivor in need of rescue, or in the case of story-related missions, some obscure objective standing in for a survivor. Add to this a lack of any sort of real challenge once you’ve mastered the controls. Even the boss battles, which are at least insane enough to be interesting, are too easy for their own good. Money for weapons is always plentiful and leveling up is effortless. One can jack up the challenge by playing the hard mode of course, but it would be nice if the normal difficulty would offer at least a modicum of challenge. There are some hard parts. The main zombies aren’t ever much of a threat, but the zombified poodles and parrots can cause you some problems simply because they’re more aggressive, harder to hit, and consistently respawn.

The controls too offer both a mix of good and bad. Like with the Wii edition of Resident Evil 4, you aim your guns with the Wii remote, which works remarkably well as long as you’re sitting a reasonable distance from the television. I wish more games would try to incorporate this somehow. Chop Till You Drop tries to incorporate further motion control, a la remote waggling for melee attacks but it isn’t responsive enough to be practical. Thankfully the developers let you perform the same attacks with the A button. There are some special moves that can be activated through motion control sequences, but generally they’re pretty useless. You’ll get by best on your basic attacks.

There are some glaring problems with the control scheme though. It may seem like a minor issue, but the reload system is highly flawed. Conveniently, Chop Till You Drop features both a quick select menu for selecting weapons in real time and a more traditional inventory screen accessed by pausing the game. Both are relatively handy most of the time. To reload you simply reselect your current weapon in the quick select menu. This would work fine except for that the quick select menu is accessed using the Wii remote’s d-pad, and its small size makes it very easy to push the wrong direction. I can’t count the number of times I would push the up button to reload my handgun and at the same time nick the left button. Rather than reloading I would end up equipping my sniper rifle which, defying all shooter logic, is pretty useless throughout much of the game. It’s a flaw that doesn’t break the game, but it might have been nice to have a button devoted to reloading.

Beyond these issues, the game doesn’t have much else to complain about. The audio is fine, but doesn’t really do much beyond the bare bones necessities. The voice acting is high quality; I couldn’t think of a single character who seemed miscast. The Wii version also fixes many of the save system problems that plagued the original. You have multiple save files, and the game lets you save whenever you want, so no matter how you mess up in the game you can easily reload and try again. Overall, after a few hours of play, I suspect most people will be ready to move on. Honestly, if you have either of this generation’s other consoles, you’d be better off waiting for Dead Rising 2.