Review | Dead Rising 2

Zombies are gateway monsters. The best zombie fiction uses them as a device to make way for an infinite number of scenarios that tear apart civilisation, society and humanity. Dead Rising 2 gets this, and offers you a near infinite number of ways to kill, maim and torture the undead menace.

It’s only fair to warn you that very little has changed since the first Dead Rising. Once again you are cruelly trapped in a zombie-infested urban setting with a thousand potential weapons, a list of surviving humans to rescue, insane psychopaths to take down and a hidden truth to uncover. Anyone who thought Dead Rising wasn’t anything special might want to steer clear, but the rest will be treated to another ridiculous and bloody adventure. Unfortunately many of the awkward missteps of the first game have also carried over to the sequel, including sluggish controls and long load times, but the overall experience of being set loose in a playground of the dead far outweighs any problems.

You play the game as Chuck Greene, an ex-motocross champion who carries on the Dead Rising tradition of heroes that look like they headbutt frying pans all day. Poor Chuck lost his wife when Las Vegas fell victim to an outbreak, and his daughter Katey was bitten, meaning she now requires a daily dose of expensive anti-infection medication called Zombrex. Currently residing in Fortune City, Chuck has to generate cash by participating in ‘Terror is Reality’, a game show where contestants take out zombies for points (sound familiar?). To the surprise of absolutely nobody, the walking dead get loose and overrun the entire place. Chuck quickly finds out he has been framed for the terrorist act and he now has three days to clear his name before the military busts in and does their thing.

What with his dead wife, sick daughter, awesome job and cool jacket, Chuck is a very sympathetic and likable hero, much more so than the indomitable Frank West. The other characters all play up their B-movie stereotypes in a charming and hilarious way, and all the people you’d expect are present. There is the no-nonsense activist woman with her practical ponytail, the suspicious old security guard, the overtly sexy reporter who will do anything for a scoop and the bodacious and arrogant game show host, complete with fur coat. Even the survivors all have their briefly entertaining stories, even if they are told through the same lifeless text boxes as the first game. The plot is ridiculous, and it plays up to that fact beautifully, never taking itself very seriously. Nor should it, when you’re allowed to become the savior of the human race while wearing a dinosaur mask, footie pyjamas and high heels.

Like the first game you have to wander the area, picking up clues and meeting various survivors with that ever ticking timer. Each event – be it part of the plot or someone to rescue – is only available for a set time and if you miss it then it vanishes forever. If it was a survivor to rescue or a madman with a knife to take out there isn’t much punishment for failure, but if you miss part of the main story or don’t give your daughter her medicine then that whole thread is forever lost, at least without restarting the game. While the timer seems restrictive at first, it does keep the game moving along and you’ll generally have plenty of time to get to your next objective while still having fun along the way.

Again like the first game, you can still keep playing after you fail the story, you’ll even get a less than positive ending for your trouble. The other option – to start again but retain your current character level, complete with stat bonuses and special moves – obviously makes things a lot easier the second (or third, or fourth) time around. Chuck is a slow, weak little man when you first start out, but by the time you’ve reached level 50 he is a zombie killing machine. Given the difficulty you have at the start, Dead Rising always seems to actively encourage repeated attempts, making it one of the few games that has forced replay value.

This isn’t Dead Rising 1.5, however, and there are plenty of improvements that make it feel like a worthy sequel. The save system was the number one complaint players had about the first game, and accordingly there are now three save slots instead of one and many more bathroom save points scattered around the map. The game even gives you the option of saving after important events, meaning you are much less likely to end up replaying the whole game because you forgot to save and got eaten by one fat old lady zombie. Fans (or haters) of the previous game will also be happy to know that the radio system has been streamlined, with your contact now leaving you polite messages to read at your leisure instead of calling you to tell you where the pizza shop is while you get your face eaten off. Rescuing survivors has also undergone a major improvement, in that they are no longer complete morons. While trying to save some poor sap’s life in the first game was an impossible chore, guiding a group through the horde is now a simple, but still challenging, task.

Zombies have been made a little smarter, at least by zombie standards, and will aggressively target Chuck whenever he is nearby. Luckily Chuck Greene is no Frank West, and he knows his way around a zombie or two. His greatest new asset is the game’s much-publicised weapon combining system. Through the power of duct tape, Chuck can take two items and combine them to make one incredibly awesome new object. Our man will deftly tape a machete to the end of a push broom, use an aerosol can and a traffic cone to create a head-exploding air horn, attach assault rifles to an electric wheelchair and set fire to a pair of boxing gloves, among other things. The combinations are all pre-set, so you won’t be able to let your imagination run wild, but there are plenty of mad combos to discover either through levelling up, defeating psychopaths or looking at movie posters. You can even find new ideas through simply trying different combinations, but you won’t unlock the full power of the weapon – including its special attack – until you grab the combo card. Combo weapons are harder to break, cause more damage and give you more points. Plus they are outrageously fun and silly.

You’ll want a few powerful combo weapons in your inventory too, in case you run into one of those pesky psychopaths. Just like in the original, Psychopaths are humans who have been driven stark raving bonkers by the situation and are usually in the process of killing or torturing other survivors, you, or both. Plot-wise, these nut-jobs are the highlight of the game, managing to be even more broken than their predecessors. Unfortunately the same can’t be said of the gameplay experience. It’s during these battles that you really notice how clunky the control system still is. Chuck often takes noticable time to react to button presses, which doesn’t matter much fighting a slow zombie, but frustrates the hell out of you when fighting a speedy human. Fights that could have been tense and exciting quickly make you pull out your hair, scream and run to find a better weapon.

The other major flaw in the game is loading times. Endless loading times. Fortune City is broken up into various malls and casinos, each separated by a long loading screen. Every cutscene (and there are a decent amount) is also started and finished with a loading screen, and sometimes there is even loading between scenes. Staring at a frozen screen waiting for the action to start for so long and so frequently quickly pulls you out of the world, which is a shame considering it is generally immersive and well paced.

Dead Rising 2 does have a cooperative mode, in which a second Chuck can join in the single player game. This mode is great fun for causing twice the mayhem and formulating strategies for tackling different sections of the game. Destroying waves of the undead with a friend is a blast, and you can even set your game to public if you want to allow any bored gamer to wander in. It’s recommended that you play through the story at least once by yourself first, though, as having another player messing with your world might derail your progress. There is also a multiplayer mode based on the ‘Terror is Reality’ game show, in which four players can compete in a series of zombie killing minigames for prize money. It sounds a little tacked on, but that’s only because it’s tacked on. The games are shallow and not nearly as fun as the main game. You can use money won in the multiplayer to buy things in single player, but it isn’t really worth the trouble.

Whether you are mindlessly slaughtering corpses with a broadsword, fleeing from a mad Italian chef or uncovering a vast conspiracy, Dead Rising 2 is pure entertainment. Almost everything you can do in the game is fun. The simple joy of running around a giant zombie-slaying sandbox has carried over well from the first game, and with the addition of ever more crazy weapon and item combinations (teddy bear machine gun turret) you can easily lose hours in the game. It has some rough edges – driving is still awful and you can’t mark where you are on the map – but with the amount of things to do, a tight story and a huge amount of replay value, Dead Rising 2 manages to define exactly what an open world game should be.