"Dead Rising 2" Review

Dead Rising was the first horror game I played, and that was back where everything scared me. When I first played it I literally had to sleep with the lights on at night for months afterwards. However after I watched some horror movies with some friends and generally stopped being such a wuss, I started liking the whole zombie concept and now would actually love for a zombie outbreak to happen.

Dead Rising 2 has you play as 'Chuck Greene', whom has been framed for a zombie outbreak in fortune city (based off Las Vegas) Chuck has to clear his name and keep his daughter alive before the military arives in 72 hours

Anyone that played the original Dead Rising will see alot of similarities the game plays almost exactly the same.

Kill Zombies, Rescue Survivours and Kill Psychopaths. Although it's hard to deny a improvement over the previous game, Survivours are smarter, more zombies can fit on screen at once and the psychopaths are more menacing (and loonily) this time round. However on that matter the Zombies are unthreatening, they are slow and unaggressive to the point where they are only ever a threat at the low levels. Psychopaths (which are the equivalent of the games bosses) are the complete opposite of that, they are highly aggressive and deal large amounts of damage, making the fights against them brutally hard in comparison with the standard of killing zombies. Which generally comes to a difficultly curb of running into an oncoming train.

Throughout Production, one of the massively promoted things about the game were combo weapons, it seemed like such a good idea in production the ability to have two items and duct tape them together and create something that would slaughter zombies. Good in theory bad in practice, as the combos are fixed so you can't grab two random objects and duct tape them together, and generally the harder the items you need are to find the least likely you will go out of your way to make that item. A good example is the Paddlesaw, this is the most advertised weapon of the game, two chainsaws duct taped on both sides, however it is nearly useless in the game. There is only one paddle in the game (or at least only one I've found so far) and it's durability is poor, only being able to kill between 50 to 100 zombies before breaking. There are 51 combo weapons in the game, though taking out the ones that are useless and the ones that are nearly impossible to make, left me with 4 that I used on a regular basis. This is not saying that the combo weapons are always bad, they are nearly always better than using regular weapons because of this throughout most of the game you'll be using the spiked bat and not much else because you get one every time you go to the safe room.

A.I has massively improved since the first game, (the amount of times that I almost threw my controller at my screen because of the idiot survivours running into a potplant than getting mauled by zombies). Good to know for anyone that despised the survivours is that they can actually get though the zombie hordes reasonably well (i've so far played the game though twice and haven't lost a single one I was escorting yet) though this does make escorting them pathetically easy, and tactics are simple as walk to were you need to go, wait about 30 seconds for them to catchup. It generally changes the survivours to just an excuse to get you to walk back to the saferoom. Most of the survivours are at least interesting though with some of them having some interesting backstorys, even if most of the back story is reveled in text across the screen (which is thankfully large enough to read now)

The psychopaths however are the most fun part of the game, unlike the first game where most of them were still (somewhat) sane, this time there all bat-shit crazy. From a teenager in a mascot outfit that wants you dead for killing his girlfriend to a couple of Magicians whose 'saw' trick doesn't go according to plan. As already stated the psychopath fights are really hard and if you're not prepared for them then you're going to get slaughtered, though one of the best factors of the psychopaths is the music that plays when you fight them, it makes the fight feel more alive. Though the difficulty of the psychopaths is made harder by the fact that guns are absolutely useless, unless there being used against you, in which case guns will do tons of damage.


The game has two multiplayer modes, a standard co-op, and Terror is reality, which looks similar to the gladiators tv show. Co-op Funtions similar to how it did in Halo, an exact clone of you pops in with no explaination and does'nt appear in the cut scenes, although the co-op is fun, it does go to make the game pathetically easy. But there is a saddist joy of watching a friend slaughter zombies in one direction while you do in another the possibilities do become near endless of what 2 people can do together in the game. Terror is Reality is the game's verses mode, it is fun at the start but becomes nothing more than just a bunch of repetitive mini-games similar to the games you'd find in Mario party or Fusion Frenzy, but seeing how there is only 9 of them in this game they get old very fast.

Dead Rising 2 is enjoyable and quite is fun and does remain fun for quite some some, I've so far played though the game 2 and a half times and I'm still enjoying it, it far surpasses its predecessor in terms of gameplay and story. and is nice to spend time killing zombies (even if everyone has slaughter thousands of zombies already)

Single Player: 8/10
Co-op            8.5/10
Versus             4/10


(note co-op and Versus play can only be done over Xbox live and PSN, spiltscreen and system link co-op are not available)