Dead Rising 2 Review

Dead Rising 2 review

By Cyraxis

I've put a lot of thought into the whole idea of zombies, as I'm sure many a person who spends their life on the internet have. There are many forums and discussion boards dedicated to making the perfect zombie plan for the upcoming zombie apocalypse. It was this very topic the other day that lead me to an interesting conclusion. For zombies to move they need blood pumping to their limbs, to get that their heart needs to pump the blood, for the heart to pump the brain needs to tell it to, for the brain to work it needs oxygen from the lungs. Now I admit that I don't know much about the human body but if your heart, lungs and brain are working then the chances are that your not dead. From this I have decided that the only way a zombie could exist is through magic and as a man of science I don't believe in magic.

Well that brings us nicely into the game in question, Dead Rising 2 a third person survival horror action comedy thing I guess. Now I need to learn to keep my reviews short a sweet so I'll summarise the plot like this, your trapped in what is clearly not Las Vegas after another zombie outbreak, rescue is arriving in three game days and and you need to survive till it does arrive. Now there are actual missions on this game and I have done them all but the plot is somewhat insubstantial and the game doesn't end if you fail the main plot so just go off to have fun because that's what the game is about and that's all I'm going to talk about.

Essentially the game is just a timed demolition derby with you using whatever you can get your hands on to kill as many of the undead as you can before you need to be rescued. You can use basically anything as a weapon from the obvious stuff like chairs and golf clubs, to swords and spears you find in various shops and casinos, to guns, wheelchairs and teddy bears. It is almost anything you can see you can use and it does lead to some hilarious situations, for example I once found myself trapped on top of an information kiosk surrounded by the recently deceased with nothing but a box of fireworks a coat hanger and a water pistol however due to my genius I managed to survive that encounter.

There are other things to do besides the missions though, for example there are other survivors in the mall that you can save and bring back to the safe house though some of them have certain things you need to de before you can save them, for example there is a woman who was trapped under a sun bed and is now burnt to a crisp and needs a drink before you can take her anywhere, half the times someone asks for something however I just turned around saying “ok then, stay here and die I'm going to go set zombies on fire”. The reason for saving them is to earn large amounts of experience points to level up and as the game goes along you need these levels and extra skills to stay alive however this only gives a gentle difficulty curve if your not doing the missions.

Other ways to gain experience are limited to killing things but this isn't so bad as it is the entire point of the game, you can make custom weapons at workbenches which give you bonus experience per kill though most the weapons are rather picky as to what they will be combined with and you'll rely on the combo cards you collect to know what goes with what...well them or the internet. Also to kill are the psychopaths, deranged humans who are basically the bosses of the game all of which attack in some unique pattern that you have to learn before you have a chance of killing them. In my opinion these are the most interesting characters in the game because you can make up your own back story for them and reasons for why they went insane and at the same time they are all hilarious with their dialogue. Personally I'd like to think if there was a zombie attack that I would become a psychopath like these guys, I could dress up in my cyberpunk outfit and run around with my katana, it'd be awesome.

To conclude I would say that Dead Rising 2 is a very fun game with lots of replay ability to it, if only to see how many zombies you can kill in the time allotted. There are a few problems here and there but nothing game breaking or even really worth note, the worst is probably that I find there to be a tiny delay with your movements but I would recommend this game and give it a solid 8 out of 10 and it will certainly stop you going out and rioting in the streets for a while. Now I'm off to role play Dead Rising, where's my sword?

Final thought: I don't think a real zombie apocalypse will ever happen because by the time it does I'll have already taken over the world and if zombies do appear they'll just be a method of disposing of those who don't follow my tyrannical regime.