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I liked the original Dead Rising. Sure, it had its hang ups. You couldn't see any text on anything if you didn't own a HDTV, the boss battles were extremely difficult, the survivors were idiots, and Otis... Otis... would interrupt you in the most inopportune times. At its heart though, existed an awesome zombie survival game that was limited only by your own imagination. So I was super excited to hear that Capcom would be releasing a sequel to their game that took care of some of its fans biggest complaints. So if you played the first one, is it worth going through the second? In short, yes, yes it is.
Dead Rising 2 picks the story up in Fortune City, host of the latest Terror Is Reality show where contestants fight zombies for big money. Chuck Greene competes in these games to be able to afford Zombrex, a zombie virus suppressant drug for his daughter. Things go to hell, and they get pinned on Chuck, who has 72 hours to clear his name. Not the most original of stories, but the story isn't important here, it's zombie killing that we came for.
Chuck has quite the knack for combining items together to make new interesting ways to kill zombies. A cement cutter and stack of plates will give you a plate thrower that slices through packs of zombies with ease. Got a wooden sword? Add some motor oil to it and you've got yourself an Infernal Weapon (one of my favorites). There's a total of 50 different items you can create out of other weapons and items that you're free to try to discover on your own, or save survivors, stop psychos, or even get ideas for from movie posters.
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| Paddle + Saw = Untouchable |
The Survivors this time around are much smarter, and you can hand simple weapons over to them that they can defend themselves with, or even save you from becoming zombie chow. The Psychos on the other hand, are very similar to the boss fights you would run into from Dead Rising 2. These fights can still be hair pullingly frustrating, as they have lots of life, and weapons they can do a lot of damage with. Fortunately, you can take some of their weapons to help fight others. It would be extremely rare to find me without katanas and the six shooter to handle anything that might surprise me. If things get TOO out of hand, the game has cooperative play online to bring a friend along to work together on those problems.
Your radio now acts as a quest log, only when message is deemed "urgent" will it keep ringing until you pick it up, and if you happen to have to start attacking, the conversation keeps going. No more being called rude by the janitor. Save points are much easier to find, and they even give you three save slots to work with instead of the one that Dead Rising players were stuck with. It seems like it would be a small change, but it allows you to play a little bit bolder if you know you've got a few points to fall back on.
So they made a lot of good changes to the game, is there anything I didn't like about it? Well, yeah. The game is not without its parts that make me want to throw the controller. The psycho fights go poorly until you find some good weapons to fight them with (see Infernal Weapons above), and I still think that the AI cheats at poker. Money doesn't come easily in the game, if you want the cars and the like, you're going to have to go online to play their Terror Is Reality multiplayer games. Finally, and this is a minor gripe, I really would have liked to be able to put items together on the fly instead of having to find a maintenance room. I understand why they chose to go this direction, but still.
So you like killing zombies, right? I mean, who doesn't. If you haven't picked this one up yet, I highly recommend it. Even if you're not going to follow the story and just want to run out into the stores, toss on a tuxedo, grab a sledgehammer, and introduce it to the nearest zombie skull, you're going to have a lot of fun. I sure did.
