Dead Rising 2 Review

When I heard that the development for Dead Rising 2 had been handed over to Blue Castle Games, a company that I personally had never heard of, I was slightly worried. With developers like Ninja Theory taking care of DmC and Donkey Kong Country: Returns in the hands of Retro Studios, I feel as though we’ll be seeing more of this in the future, but if Dead Rising 2 is any indication to how these studios treat existing IPs then we can all take a massive breather.

In Dead Rising 2 you play as Chuck Greene, an ex-motocross champion who is more or less forced into participating in the game show Terror is Reality in order to win money to buy his daughter some Zombrex. The anti-virus Zombrex plays a huge role in the main storyline of Dead Rising 2, every 24 hours you must (well you don’t have to...) retrieve Zombrex in order for to stop Katie from turning into a zombie. But wait, there’s more! Chuck is also framed for the zombie outbreak in the games setting, Fortune City, so it’s up to him to clear his name within 72 hours before the military arrives. Chuck can’t do this alone however; joining him on this adventure is Stacey, the leader of an organisation named CURE which if you can’t guess, is a bunch of protesters who are against violence towards zombies. There’s a whole cast of characters including the random survivors, the psychopaths who are all for the most part brimming with personality, I won’t spoil anything for you but if you like your crazy and so-bad-it’s-good writing then Dead Rising 2 has got you covered.

Let’s face it though, you’re not coming to Dead Rising 2 for the story (I hope), you came to kill zombies and Dead Rising 2 most certainly let’s you do that. In exchange for the photography system which was present in the first game, Dead Rising 2 now has you finding Combo Cards, Combo Cards will give tell you what two objects you can combine in maintenance rooms located throughout Fortune City, let me give you some examples: Gems + Flashlight = Lightsaber. Boxing Gloves + Motor Oil = Flaming Boxing Gloves. Blanka’s Head + Battery = Rolling Thunder. So yes, it’s crazy in its highest form and I love it. My issue with this though during your first few levels you’ll probably need to rely on these combo weapons more than you would really want to, granted they do give you bonus PP but I would have to have used that sledgehammer without thinking that I could be getting PP by using a spiked bat. Combat itself though feels much like it did in the first game, a lot the weapons now have two to three hit combo strings but some do you leave you open to attack more than others and some are just downright useless. Psychopaths are also back, as you can imagine some are more disgusting and foul than others but some I feel as though are genuinely mental, which in turn makes me feel bad for killing them. Regardless these characters are all incredibly fun to watch but insanely frustrating to kill, there are few psychopaths I cannot wait to destroy on my second playthrough with my powered up Chuck. Another thing that remains the same is the games time based structure which will immediately put some people off, some people will also be pleased to hear is that you can save in three different slots, personally I never found an issue with this in the first game but I’m just letting you know, you now have three save slots. Enjoy.

Surprisingly, Dead Rising 2 actually looks worse than its predecessor, not by a significant amount but you can see why the cuts were made, for one the game engine can handle up to 7000 zombies on screen at once, that’s impressive. Additionally you can now play co-op with another friend; the second player does not play as Frank West, no sir you’ll have to wait for Case West for that, the second player in fact controls another Chuck Greene. We did have issues when playing the game in co-op, for starters there was initial confusion on where to actually save, if you want to take your PP back to your single player game be sure to overwrite the save you wish do that in, the mistake I made was making a new save for my co-op character. Aside from some connection errors the worst issue I had is that whenever the host decides to save the game the other player is disconnected, you can save after you are disconnected so it’s good to know that all your “hard work” is not actually lost. When I did manage to get online I was well and truly shocked, there was no latency or lag spikes to speak of which led to fantastic online experience. Let’s hope for a patch to fix this issue soon and more importantly, let’s see what those pesky PC modders can do to increase the co op player cap.

Like the previous game, the sound design is impeccable, from the brutally vile sound of the sledgehammer smashing through a zombie to the grungy metal that accompanies each boss fight, the line delivery for most of the characters is atrociously bad it’s like they were competing to see if they could out-cheese the first game, that’s not a complaint, I love it. And while Chuck certainly hasn’t covered wars, he makes a fantastic, believable protagonist with good balance of seriousness and smarm which makes you want to save him and his daughter from the zombie outbreak.

The game lasts across five in game days which comes to around 6 – 8 hours depending on the ending you go for, you can continue if Katie turns into a zombie unlike Case Zero so the lack of an infinity mode is justified appropriately, on my first playthrough I managed to reach level 33, bear in mind I was playing co op in between and I did take my PP back so you can expect to finish around the level 30 mark if you dedicate to playing the single player from start to finish with no restarts.

So what can I say? This is the sequel Dead Rising deserves so for that I congratulate Blue Castle Games and I am eagerly anticipating the release of Case West, if you are accustomed to the style of gameplay of the first Dead Rising and are willing to accept some plot holes and quite frankly ridiculous plot devices then it’s safe to say you’ll have a blast with this game.