Yeah, you're on fire.
The first Dead Rising was a very stupid, yet somehow fun game that dropped you into a mall full of zombies and said "Have fun!". It didn't have a great control setup, the story and characters were laughably cliche and silly, and the mission structure of the game is almost set up to make you feel like you have to restart the game at some point. Dead Rising 2 is more of that, and is inexplicably still fun.
Enter Chuck Greene, a smart mouthed rough and tumble motocross star who takes the role of protagonist in Dead Rising 2. His daughter has zombitis and, as you could have probably guessed, they end up trapped in a large mall area full of undead shuffle-walkers. The inclusion of Chuck's daughter Katie actually does affect the game slightly, as you have to continuously bring her a supply of Zombrex medicine to keep her zombification at bay. Essentially, however, the flow of the game works very much like the original Dead Rising. You traverse the mall, rescuing stranded survivors and killing murderous psychopaths, while having to be in certain places at certain times to further the plot of the game. This is still a structure that challenges you to try and do it all, and punishes you pretty severely if you decide to save before you realize that you don't have enough time to get to where you need to be. It would have been nice to have a few helpful changes in some areas - for instance why can't I give Zombrex to the lady who spends the whole game in the same room as Katie? It seems like that would be easier than me having to sprint back across the mall in order to keep her from becoming a pint-sized people-eater.
The gameplay too is largely unchanged, but there are a few tweaks that are worth mentioning. You can of course grab almost any object you can find and start murdering zombies at your whim, or employ a variety of wrestling style moves that you acquire as you level up. The main addition is combo weapons, which replace the much less destructive picture taking mechanics from the first Dead Rising. Basically if you find a work bench and have two items that can be combined, you get a much more crazy weapon or item that is pretty unique, and in most cases give you a ton of PP. In case you didn't know, PP is Dead Rising lingo for experience points, and it's how you level up. You still get most of your PP from rescuing survivors, killing psychopaths and completing story missions, but the amount gained by using combo weapons to kill tons of zombies isn't negligible. There are also a few other ways to get PP, such as finding gifts for Katie and giving them to her. The combo weapon system is fun and gives you a lot of crazy ways to slaughter more zombies, but when you're trying to complete the story and as many side quests as possible you don't really have any free time to experiment with different combinations, and will probably just end up with an inventory full of spiked bats like I did.
Really, Dead Rising 2 does very little that the first game didn't do, and most of what the first game did was stupid, silly, or slightly broken. Somehow though the dry humor, ridiculous zombie massacre, and even the legitimate problems of this game make it an enjoyable time that is still pretty different from other modern games. I always think of Dead Rising not as a 3rd person pseudo open-world action adventure game, but as a semi broken zombie humiliation experimentation playground. In that regard Dead Rising 2 is great fun, but if you try to take it on as a serious action game released in 2010, you might find yourself scratching your head a bit.
