Dead Rising 2 is a action/adventure game that does almost everything the same as it's predecessor. This time around, you play as a burned out motocross rider who is working odd and ridiculous jobs in order to make ends meet and make enough to buy Zombrex, the new medication that temporarily prevents becoming a zombie after somebody had been infected. The Zombrex is for your character's daughter, who was bit by a zombie but the effects have been held off due to the medication.
Gameplay: 7.0
Unique gameplay concepts - What drives the game, and what is it similar to?
Dead Rising 2 is a game in which your goal is to figure out what is really going on with the zombie outbreak. You are supposed to proceed through various missions in their main story until you finally figure out what is going on, and learn the truth, just like the first Dead Rising. During the downtime of the story, you can explore the map, kill zombies, do side-quests and ultimately try to rescue as many people as you can before your extraction shows up.
You can earn new combat moves and learn new weapon combinations to make super weapons and mow zombies down in both effective and hilarious ways. You level up by gaining PP (which stood for picture points in the first Dead Rising, when you took pictures of Zombies and gained points based on how cool the picture was.. I don't know what it's supposed to stand for now). Like the first, you don't have the freedom to apply your leveling to whatever you want, as it gives you new traits, moves and whatever else as it chooses, so that's a little unusual.
This game has pretty poor navigation - it's hard to tell where on the map you're supposed to go to get to the next quest location. You're often prone to wandering into a boss fight that you aren't nearly prepared for. Although, at least you can walk away from the boss fight at any time and as long as you don't leave the entire area, you can still return to fight him.
And speaking of boss fights, fighting anything other than dumb, slow zombies is really irritating. Several bosses have way too much health, methods of healing that you basically can't stop, and instances in which they will pin you to the floor so you can't do anything at all. Not to mention, if you find a good method to kill them, they can ignore damage taken whenever they feel like they want to. Their structure when making "challenging" fights is amateur, at best. I'd rather kill hoards of dumb enemies than take on any sort of competent enemy. It makes saving people hard to care about.
One bonus is that the NPCs that you're supposed to save are a lot better in Dead Rising 2. You no longer feel like you need to babysit whoever you are trying to rescue, and you typically make steady progress.
I can't count how many extra hours I had to put into this game to re-do things I had already done, and died forgetting to save. That's right.. still no autosave feature, which I can tell you takes absolutely no time to write and implement into a game. Big-time fail, and wow is it annoying. I probably played about 60% more of this game than I wanted to because of dying and having to play the same part of the game over and over.
While killing zombies is always entertaining, the point of playing the game is to complete the story. Part of the story is finding Zombrex for your daughter, and these items are ridiculously rare. The only way you'll find them is if you go completely out of your way to look in the most unlikely of places, or if you go around breaking casino slot machines to get enough money to buy it. At one point, I found myself beating on slot machines to get enough money in time to buy the medication and get back to the base so I didn't lose the game (although I never could, so I had to look up where one of the items was on the internet). It feels like they're missing the point if you have all of these zombies that are fun to kill, and you're off beating slot machines and endlessly searching around the map for one item instead. Who decided this was a good idea?
I should stop myself and say that there's another way you can earn money, and that is through this ridiculous mini-game where you're in a real arena, and you all get motorcycles with chainsaws on them and go running over zombies. The more zombies you run over, the more money you get. They actually made a really stupid attempt at folding this into the story and it's just ridiculous.
This game and it's predecessor somewhat unfortunately made a silly game about zombies a lot more challenging than it should be. The zombies are practically a side-show for what they really wanted to do, and that is make an action/adventure game about being a hero or something. You can go around and kill zombies or whatever if you really want to, but if you lose any story mission, you lose the game. Besides, they wanted you to play the game the way it's intended, and that is to evade as many zombies as possible and only kill zombies as a necessity to clear a path. It's unfortunate they made the game like this because killing zombies is a lot of fun, but you feel obligated to play the parts of the game that aren't fun.
Presentation: 8.5
Graphical and audio presentation (animation, texturing, overall look & artistic style)
I always thought the first Dead Rising looked pretty good. This game looks about the same. The synchronization between talking and animation is a little rough at points.
Theatrics: 3.0
Story, Dialogue, Cut-Scenes and Artistic Use of Camera
This game's story is a joke. At the start of the game, your character is a contestant on a ridiculous reality/game show where you kill zombies on a motorcycle that has chainsaws tied to the handlebars. After the show, somebody lets all of the zombies loose, prompting an outbreak. Quite convenient. You're being framed as the person who is responsible for the outbreak, and it's your goal to clear your name and escape from the area with your daughter as a non-zombie.
The turns in the story are laughable. There is one point where your character and another character are talking in the security room, and they turn to a monitor and say something like "gasp! There's something on the monitor", and it shows two figures standing still, doing nothing. And they make the comment of "they look very organized.. they probably know what happened here!". Yes... two shadowy figures standing around look pretty organized. What a convenient plot device!
One of the strange things with this game is how much they lost their self-respect. Every female character, whether they're fat, skinny, zombie, human, whatever, has mega cleavage and huge boobs. There are playboy ads all over the game, literally on almost every sign throughout the area. Every female character is vixen-like and promiscuous. It's such a desperate stab to hold your attention because the game's story is so piss poor.
And not only is your character's daughter pointless in terms of gameplay, her role in the story is a cheap attempt at an emotional connection and adds absolutely nothing. Finding a terrible voice actor for the child didn't help, either.
Controls: 7.5
Ease of Use and Smoothness of Controls
There are some confusing contradictions with this game's controls. When you press the left trigger, it enters either aiming mode or throwing mode depending on what weapon you have. But, sometimes you can move and sometimes you can't. I don't understand why. It's a little annoying sometimes, particularly when trying to be tactical with your weapons.
There are also gaps wherein you are supposed to deal damage to a target, but you whiff and deal no damage even though you're well within range.. even swinging right through them. This, particularly in boss fights, gets really frustrating.
I also thought their controls for pushing objects like dumpsters and shopping carts, for example, were really bad in Dead Rising 1, and didn't change at all in Dead Rising 2. They even changed the vehicle handling to be more standard, using triggers to accelerate and brake, but didn't bother to change other vehicle-like objects that you push while you run. Instead the controls for that are X to run and B to stop using the objects. Why not use the triggers and have a little consistency?
Replay Value: 6.0
Total Gameplay Time versus Expected
If you played Dead Rising 1, this game will lose it's appeal pretty quickly. If you haven't played Dead Rising 1, you'll probably play through the entire game and have an okay time with it. It does feel like a sequel in the sense that it's basically an expansion with a new character, but it suffers from almost the exact same problems that made you want to pull your hair out during Dead Rising 1, except they were more acceptable back when we had lower standards.. 5 years ago. The lack of an autosave is so incredibly annoying.
In terms of Replay Value, I can't give it particularly high marks because it's a single-player driven game, with multiplayer, but the multiplayer is nothing but an online version of that ridiculous game show in the beginning of the campaign. I should also mention that this game has a co-op mode, but not many people (or any) I knew played it when it first came out, so it was non-existent to me. Random people can join your session at any time unless you tell the game you don't want company. To me, it seems a little unnecessary to throw co-op in just any old game, but it's not as if the co-op in this game hurts anything.
Fun: 7.0
What were the most and least fun parts of the game? Overall, how much fun is the game?
Just like Dead Rising 1, this game is more fun if you don't care about the story. If you walk around beating on Zombies, it's fun. If you care about winning, it's a lot less fun and the Zombies become really annoying. If the game was much more focused around wasting zombies, I think it'd be a lot more fun. Even setting up an outpost for the survivors and finding them supplies while they fought off zombie hoards would be a lot better than their lame story missions and random boss fights. Instead, the survivors just stand around. They left a lot of unexplored gameplay on the table, which kind of sucks.
There's only so much Zombie-killing you can do before it gets boring, anyway, and playing the story is an inevitability. It does has novelty appeal, and it's fun for a little while. But expect numerous times of extreme frustration due to either bad design or just bad ideas overall, because you have to push through the story either to get better combat moves, better weapons or more traits that make killing zombies more fun.
I ran out of patience quickly with this game because I had played the first, and this game doesn't do a whole lot more than the first did. The same problems exist, and thus the same frustrations exist. I had enough dealing with random BS with the first, and the second didn't inspire me to tolerate it much more.
My Overall Rating: 6.8
Complexity Level: Simple, but confused. Picking up and playing this game is simple. Killing zombies and whatnot is easy stuff. But fighting as hard as you can isn't hard, it's just unstable. So if you're getting your butt kicked in certain parts of the game, it's not because you're not good, it's because the developers just didn't make for good balance at those points.
Gameplay: 7.0
Unique gameplay concepts - What drives the game, and what is it similar to?
Dead Rising 2 is a game in which your goal is to figure out what is really going on with the zombie outbreak. You are supposed to proceed through various missions in their main story until you finally figure out what is going on, and learn the truth, just like the first Dead Rising. During the downtime of the story, you can explore the map, kill zombies, do side-quests and ultimately try to rescue as many people as you can before your extraction shows up.
You can earn new combat moves and learn new weapon combinations to make super weapons and mow zombies down in both effective and hilarious ways. You level up by gaining PP (which stood for picture points in the first Dead Rising, when you took pictures of Zombies and gained points based on how cool the picture was.. I don't know what it's supposed to stand for now). Like the first, you don't have the freedom to apply your leveling to whatever you want, as it gives you new traits, moves and whatever else as it chooses, so that's a little unusual.
This game has pretty poor navigation - it's hard to tell where on the map you're supposed to go to get to the next quest location. You're often prone to wandering into a boss fight that you aren't nearly prepared for. Although, at least you can walk away from the boss fight at any time and as long as you don't leave the entire area, you can still return to fight him.
And speaking of boss fights, fighting anything other than dumb, slow zombies is really irritating. Several bosses have way too much health, methods of healing that you basically can't stop, and instances in which they will pin you to the floor so you can't do anything at all. Not to mention, if you find a good method to kill them, they can ignore damage taken whenever they feel like they want to. Their structure when making "challenging" fights is amateur, at best. I'd rather kill hoards of dumb enemies than take on any sort of competent enemy. It makes saving people hard to care about.
One bonus is that the NPCs that you're supposed to save are a lot better in Dead Rising 2. You no longer feel like you need to babysit whoever you are trying to rescue, and you typically make steady progress.
I can't count how many extra hours I had to put into this game to re-do things I had already done, and died forgetting to save. That's right.. still no autosave feature, which I can tell you takes absolutely no time to write and implement into a game. Big-time fail, and wow is it annoying. I probably played about 60% more of this game than I wanted to because of dying and having to play the same part of the game over and over.
While killing zombies is always entertaining, the point of playing the game is to complete the story. Part of the story is finding Zombrex for your daughter, and these items are ridiculously rare. The only way you'll find them is if you go completely out of your way to look in the most unlikely of places, or if you go around breaking casino slot machines to get enough money to buy it. At one point, I found myself beating on slot machines to get enough money in time to buy the medication and get back to the base so I didn't lose the game (although I never could, so I had to look up where one of the items was on the internet). It feels like they're missing the point if you have all of these zombies that are fun to kill, and you're off beating slot machines and endlessly searching around the map for one item instead. Who decided this was a good idea?
I should stop myself and say that there's another way you can earn money, and that is through this ridiculous mini-game where you're in a real arena, and you all get motorcycles with chainsaws on them and go running over zombies. The more zombies you run over, the more money you get. They actually made a really stupid attempt at folding this into the story and it's just ridiculous.
This game and it's predecessor somewhat unfortunately made a silly game about zombies a lot more challenging than it should be. The zombies are practically a side-show for what they really wanted to do, and that is make an action/adventure game about being a hero or something. You can go around and kill zombies or whatever if you really want to, but if you lose any story mission, you lose the game. Besides, they wanted you to play the game the way it's intended, and that is to evade as many zombies as possible and only kill zombies as a necessity to clear a path. It's unfortunate they made the game like this because killing zombies is a lot of fun, but you feel obligated to play the parts of the game that aren't fun.
Presentation: 8.5
Graphical and audio presentation (animation, texturing, overall look & artistic style)
I always thought the first Dead Rising looked pretty good. This game looks about the same. The synchronization between talking and animation is a little rough at points.
Theatrics: 3.0
Story, Dialogue, Cut-Scenes and Artistic Use of Camera
This game's story is a joke. At the start of the game, your character is a contestant on a ridiculous reality/game show where you kill zombies on a motorcycle that has chainsaws tied to the handlebars. After the show, somebody lets all of the zombies loose, prompting an outbreak. Quite convenient. You're being framed as the person who is responsible for the outbreak, and it's your goal to clear your name and escape from the area with your daughter as a non-zombie.
The turns in the story are laughable. There is one point where your character and another character are talking in the security room, and they turn to a monitor and say something like "gasp! There's something on the monitor", and it shows two figures standing still, doing nothing. And they make the comment of "they look very organized.. they probably know what happened here!". Yes... two shadowy figures standing around look pretty organized. What a convenient plot device!
One of the strange things with this game is how much they lost their self-respect. Every female character, whether they're fat, skinny, zombie, human, whatever, has mega cleavage and huge boobs. There are playboy ads all over the game, literally on almost every sign throughout the area. Every female character is vixen-like and promiscuous. It's such a desperate stab to hold your attention because the game's story is so piss poor.
And not only is your character's daughter pointless in terms of gameplay, her role in the story is a cheap attempt at an emotional connection and adds absolutely nothing. Finding a terrible voice actor for the child didn't help, either.
Controls: 7.5
Ease of Use and Smoothness of Controls
There are some confusing contradictions with this game's controls. When you press the left trigger, it enters either aiming mode or throwing mode depending on what weapon you have. But, sometimes you can move and sometimes you can't. I don't understand why. It's a little annoying sometimes, particularly when trying to be tactical with your weapons.
There are also gaps wherein you are supposed to deal damage to a target, but you whiff and deal no damage even though you're well within range.. even swinging right through them. This, particularly in boss fights, gets really frustrating.
I also thought their controls for pushing objects like dumpsters and shopping carts, for example, were really bad in Dead Rising 1, and didn't change at all in Dead Rising 2. They even changed the vehicle handling to be more standard, using triggers to accelerate and brake, but didn't bother to change other vehicle-like objects that you push while you run. Instead the controls for that are X to run and B to stop using the objects. Why not use the triggers and have a little consistency?
Replay Value: 6.0
Total Gameplay Time versus Expected
If you played Dead Rising 1, this game will lose it's appeal pretty quickly. If you haven't played Dead Rising 1, you'll probably play through the entire game and have an okay time with it. It does feel like a sequel in the sense that it's basically an expansion with a new character, but it suffers from almost the exact same problems that made you want to pull your hair out during Dead Rising 1, except they were more acceptable back when we had lower standards.. 5 years ago. The lack of an autosave is so incredibly annoying.
In terms of Replay Value, I can't give it particularly high marks because it's a single-player driven game, with multiplayer, but the multiplayer is nothing but an online version of that ridiculous game show in the beginning of the campaign. I should also mention that this game has a co-op mode, but not many people (or any) I knew played it when it first came out, so it was non-existent to me. Random people can join your session at any time unless you tell the game you don't want company. To me, it seems a little unnecessary to throw co-op in just any old game, but it's not as if the co-op in this game hurts anything.
Fun: 7.0
What were the most and least fun parts of the game? Overall, how much fun is the game?
Just like Dead Rising 1, this game is more fun if you don't care about the story. If you walk around beating on Zombies, it's fun. If you care about winning, it's a lot less fun and the Zombies become really annoying. If the game was much more focused around wasting zombies, I think it'd be a lot more fun. Even setting up an outpost for the survivors and finding them supplies while they fought off zombie hoards would be a lot better than their lame story missions and random boss fights. Instead, the survivors just stand around. They left a lot of unexplored gameplay on the table, which kind of sucks.
There's only so much Zombie-killing you can do before it gets boring, anyway, and playing the story is an inevitability. It does has novelty appeal, and it's fun for a little while. But expect numerous times of extreme frustration due to either bad design or just bad ideas overall, because you have to push through the story either to get better combat moves, better weapons or more traits that make killing zombies more fun.
I ran out of patience quickly with this game because I had played the first, and this game doesn't do a whole lot more than the first did. The same problems exist, and thus the same frustrations exist. I had enough dealing with random BS with the first, and the second didn't inspire me to tolerate it much more.
My Overall Rating: 6.8
Complexity Level: Simple, but confused. Picking up and playing this game is simple. Killing zombies and whatnot is easy stuff. But fighting as hard as you can isn't hard, it's just unstable. So if you're getting your butt kicked in certain parts of the game, it's not because you're not good, it's because the developers just didn't make for good balance at those points.
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