Dead Rising 2

In Dead Rising 2 you play as professional motor cross rider Chuck Greene. Who has been framed for setting thousands upon thousands of zombies loose in the fictional Fortune City. If all that wasn’t enough you also have a little daughter, who needs to get a shot of Zombrex every 24th hour or else she will turn into one of those brain eating monsters.

Luckily Chuck Greene is a man of action, who wants to get to the bottom of the case: who framed him and why?

Now you don’t actually have to solve the mystery behind the zombie incident. In theory you could just go on a regularly killing spree for the 72 hours which the game stretches its story over and never do a single story mission. One of the key elements of the game is to gain more abilities and strength and you do so by getting Prestige Points (known as pp in the game). You get these points by killing zambies, using the special combo weapons which I will get back to in a second, saving survivors, completing case files (story missions) or fighting psychopaths.

So combo weapons is Dead Rising 2’s new main feature and you make them by combining different items. Like for example a bat + nails = spiked bat. Then some of the combo weapons are a bit more… crazy. Did you for example know that if you combine a flashlight with gems you basically get a lightsaber? No, well now you do thanks to DR2.

It’s a ton of fun finding all these different items and combining them to see whatever insane invention you come up with. The only real downside to this is that it can sometime be difficult so find the specific items to create a certain weapon, therefore you often end up making the same old classics like spiked bat and so on. Some kind of storage system would have been nice and it would make it a lot easier to make some of the crazier combinations.

Saving survivors can be a real pain in the ass. Most of the time they are pretty good to keep up with you, but when one of the survivors carries a loaded shotgun and isn’t able to tell the difference between you and a zombie… buddy are you in trouble! I experienced that exact problem pretty early on in the game, where I constantly would get shot in the back and in some cases it got so bad that he freaking killed me. At one moment I honestly thought about hitting him multiple times with my spiked bat, just to show the other survivors not to fuck with me! Then there’s the slow moving survivor which is the worst, especially if you are in a hurry to start a story mission or give Katey her daily dose of Zombrex before it’s too late. In that type of situation it should be possible to carry the survivor and run with them.

The Psychopath battles function as the boss battles in this game and you earn a lot of pp by winning those. Unfortunately a lot of them is rather poorly designed and just not really fun. Also I often walked into a psychopath not being repaired which caused me to die rather quickly and that would be especially annoying if you forgot to save your game.

I didn’t play the first Dead Rising, but I can understand they fixed the save system by adding multiple save slots and places to save. It would have been nice if they made it possible to save the game from the pause screen though. Considering the fact that there is a good distance between the save points. It doesn’t ruin the game, but it’s a minor flaw in my opinion.

But in the end Dead Rising is and always have been about killing zombies and it does so with style. Combining items into insane weapons and letting your anger loose on some poor undead people is extremely fun and damn satisfying. Like when your moving your way through thousand of zombies equipped with a paddle where a chainsaw is attached to each end. You can’t do nothing else than smile and it is at moments like these that Dead Rising 2 truly shines.