Review: Dead Rising 2

I've tried my best. I've played through to 80% completion, but I can't go on. Doing so would be a waste of my time. Dead Rising 2 has a lot of good things going for it, but it falls short of one very fundamental thing: keeping players having fun.

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Killing zombies = always good gameplay

This game has a serious case of bipolar. On the one hand, it wants to be crazy sandbox fun. For the first few hours, it does achieve this with great aplomb - picking up virtually anything you see from a fire axe to skateboard to oversized teddy to my personal favorite, a dildo to decimate hordes of shambling zombies never gets dull. Especially when the violence is no holds barred, limbs flying off, blood spurting everywhere and on your clothes. Exploring the sprawling Las Vegas complex which includes several shopping malls, casinos, hotels and an interconnected subway is exciting. The attention to detail is good and for a Japanese developer, they've captured American decadence and excessiveness with satirical accuracy.

So that's what I like about the game. Killing a whole lot of zombies in style, and you can even combine items to create wackier death-dealing contraptions, from as simple as a baseball bat with protruding nails to a rocket launcher made from fireworks and a lead pipe, or a wheelchair that sends out volts of electricity thanks to a car battery strapped to it.

The zombies don't prove much of a threat. For most of the game, they can be regarded as mere cannon fodder. They are slow moving, more of a joke in the way they stumble towards you like old people with rigor mortis. You against one zombie is little trouble. But Capcom has numbered them in the thousands. They are jam-packed into the malls and casinos. Enough to overwhelm if you aren't constantly on your toes and hacking away at them.


A little bit of zombie pop culture education in Dead Rising 2

Looking at the concept of a zombie in modern popular culture though, you'll notice the trend leaning towards the fast moving zombie. The movies 28 Days Later and Zombieland, and video game Left 4 Dead are good examples of this. Those tap into the fear modern society has for global epidemics like SARS and avian flu, as well as the sense that pathogens are more plausible causes of zombification than reanimated dead. But the Dead Rising franchise (I haven't played the first one though) pays strong homage to the traditional shambling zombie, as made a significant cultural icon by George Romero's film classic Dawn of the Dead. You see, Romero was a genius in using the old-school zombie as a metaphor for American brain-deadism towards greed and consumerism.

Capcom extends this message to Dead Rising 2's nonsensical plot. A disgraced stunt motocross racer Chuck Greene has to save his infected-but-not-yet-turned daughter by searching the Las Vegas complex for medication. On his journey, he'll encounter all sorts of strange characters, some good but mostly psychotic and evil. The zombie apocalypse has somehow either let loose mental patients from a nearby asylum or made "perfectly ordinary" American citizens crack. Like a mall cop who hangs looters. Or an S&M freak who kidnaps this girl and forces her to marry him so that he can lose his virginity. Capcom is trying to tell us that deep down, most people have a dark side and it takes the destruction of order to bring that out. It is at once frightening and exciting to see what kind of caricature the game is going to throw out next.

Poor design choices in Dead Rising 2

But here's where the game starts to get annoying. All these crazy people are mini-boss encounters spread out across the complex, to be approached via side quests, stumbled upon, or avoided like the plague. After the first two or three mini-bosses, I gave up on confronting them at all. Why? They are ridiculously the hardest parts of the game, to the point of being infuriating. All of them move at lightning speed, even the obese characters, and one hit from their weapons takes half your life out. You either have to spam healing or learn a dodge skill.

The problem with this is that the dodge skill is taught at too high a level meaning for 90% of the game, you're stuck. You will most likely die often before you get the hang of fighting some of these ridiculous bosses, especially the ones with ranged weapons (how can you fight flamethrowers when you have to get close to hit them on the head?!?). You either have to train harder, killing zombies to gain XP or just avoid them completely.


This is what I mean when I say Dead Rising 2 is bipolar. It introduces a game that starts of as good ol' fun, hacking away at zombies and wearing leotards or kids' pajamas, but then Capcom throws in these unnecessary bosses that make the game deadly serious. Also, the main plotline is a strict linear progression whereas side quests and player leveling is non-linear. This can lead to a player's inability to continue if they can't beat a main plotline boss because they haven't leveled up enough. Clearly Capcom wants you to be grinding zombies rather than powering through to see how the story unfolds. That's contradictory when you've got a time limit on missions. What do I mean?

The game gives you this enormous and beautifully designed sandbox to play in, a shopping mall worth exploring but instead of letting you take your time to browse, they've imposed a time limit on all the main and side missions. So you spend most of the time rushing to and fro locations just to beat the clock, because failing to complete a main mission in the allotted time means complete and utter game over. You'll have to start back at a save point, and because of the infrequency of toilets (where you save the game) - which I find a design quirk in an otherwise flawless shopping mall, you have a lot of replaying certain parts to do.

And lengthy and unimaginative cutscenes to skip, most of which just have Chuck standing around looking pained and constipated at some crazy bad guy who spouts some lines before you have to fight him/her. The worst part about time limits is that sometimes, you have to wait before you can start the next storyline mission, so you spend about several in-game hours trying to entertain yourself by hacking at more zombies. When we want to take our time, the game speeds up. When we want to get to the next part of the story, the game slows down.

My recommendation? Ditch the time limits and let players get to the next mission whenever they'd like. They'll eventually get there, after playing a few casino games, chowing down on some sushi and playing around in the toy shop. Also, let them save whenever they want. Hell, I can't be backtracking to a restroom each time before I fight a boss miles away. That's not fun.


The only thing that is holding the game together at this point for me, is that I do want to know what happens to Chuck and his daughter at the end, how they get out of it all. But the game seriously tries to do everything in its power to prevent me from wanting to play on. There's this ridiculous boss fight in which you alone are up against a helicopter with a Gatling gun. For about half an hour, I tried shooting at the thing with an M16 or a SAW but that does no damage whatsoever. I eventually figured out that the only way to destroy the helicopter was to throw things at it. As if hand-thrown projectiles do more damage than high velocity rounds.

The story and gameplay become more incredulous towards the end. Just as the military arrive to rescue the survivors' asses, the zombies get affected by some green smoke and turn more violent and harder to kill. Obviously, they wipe out the military column and it's up to Chuck to figure a way out. Why? What's the reasoning behind making the zombies harder suddenly? Now they can spit acid to momentarily paralyze you and when they pounce, you have to get them off with some annoying quicktime events. They also become more resilient to a few blunt thwacks of my baseball bat.

By then, I was already sick of it all. The bright lights in the shopping mall, the never-ending zombies, the slightly annoying jazz muzak and having to trek to and fro the same hallways because you always have to return to the safehouse. I decided it was no longer worth my time, but I sincerely hope Chuck got his sick daughter out and far away from the idiocy of Las Vegas. I think Capcom really captured the feel of America. Loud, brash, annoying, always in decline but never dead. But as a game, it just got really tedious and pointlessly hard.