Dead Rising 2

  Developer: Blue Castle Games
Publisher: Capcom

-Xbox 360
-Single player only (co-op, multiplayer available)
-No DLC (scheduled for the future) 
 

Dead Rising was a very deceive release on the early roster of the Xbox 360. With it’s brutal difficulty, rigid controls, and it’s Japanese crazy parody of Dawn of the Dead you either learned to love it or put down the controller hours into it. Dead Rising 2 is back now a couple of years into the console life cycle with a new Canadian developer Blue Castle Games(Recently acquired by Capcom). With its new blood and fresh eyes comes some much needed energy to the series but is this game’s original formula so unrefined that it can’t stand up against the current competition?

Premise starts very promising, you are introduced to the world through the eyes of a combatant on a zombie killing reality show Terror is Reality -a la Running Man. Your character is Chuck Greene a man of few words, who has to make ends meet any way possible to afford medicine for his sick child Katey. The game really shines in these starting moments graphically and in theme. Blue Castle’s previous experience on the Bigs series definitely shows through. This is a world already enduring with the presence of Zombies for years. But soon after introductions a catastrophe shifts the pace and the small “city” turns into a zombie playpen equipped with a safe house and most of the elements from the previous iteration crazy characters, missions, toy stores, and etc. This leads into my biggest complaint with Dead Rising 2 it’s inept ability to stray far from the original path of Dead Rising 1. The first iteration had many blatant problems with difficulty, usability, and pacing. Which could be over looked for it’s early release and original ip. Even the city itself doesn’t feel that much different from the generic shopping mall and is nowhere near as grandiose as anything inspired by Las Vegas. There are no attractions and barely any themes that you come to expect from Vegas and most of the later game story elements never comes near as engrossing as the initial story elements.

Game play wise all the base mechanics return. You are finding mostly melee weapons to to forge paths through zombie infested areas. Your actions and button presses are still heavily deli-gated by the animation which makes the game feel clunky with Chucks slow movements and clumsy attacks. Which is a fine set-up when most of your foes are slow moving zombies with one lunging attack. But when you are faced against fast moving human psychopaths the game breaks down and becomes highly frustrating. The games rule book is thrown out the window, shooting a guy in the head does less damage than hitting them anywhere else with a baseball bat. You will try to to muscle through it diminish not only your health supply but weapons as well. Until it ultimately comes down to running around an enemy and waiting for a tired animation, hit them, rinse and repeat, depending on your weapon you will still take damage. So this brings up my second major problem with the game, balancing. For a game that keystones zombie killing as it main attraction, zombies are a mere nuance to a basic errand quest game. If you are playing to rescue survivors or get to a point, you will most likely run circles around the zombies and hit once or twice to get to a door. Your attacks are way too slow across every weapon to feel that they are meaning to wade through the horde and break to easy to waste even more time to find replacements. Contrasting this with the controller breaking red light green light boss fights the combat never feels satisfactory or balanced to help with your goals. Its last boss fight might win an award for one of the worst encounters in this years games and makes you use a mechanic that is given to you from the beginning but should have never been used. It’s like saying,”O hey you remember that Nerf gun I bought you for Christmas 10 years ago, it probably still doesn’t work but go fetch it from the attic and lets pretend in the quick sand  pit in the back yard”.

There are a couple of nice tweaks from the games previous iteration. The crafting system is a nice guide to finding the more powerful weapons of the game. But this convenience will probably lead you into playing with two of the same weapons through most of the game. The survivors this time can actually fend for themselves and hardly need any attention after following. There are multiple ways of speeding transportation within the game, using motor bikes and the underground loop makes getting from one end to the other a cinch. Playing through the game in a initial play through is not the impossible Everest of the first game, you can save most of the survivors as well. But the second way through the game will feel like a walk in the park and the common annoyances of pacing will become even more evident.

  Loading... Loading .... Loading ...  Playing through Dead Rising 2 you will see this word on your screen a lot. Every area has a

load time and they can be pretty meaty up to 10-30 secs. Cut scenes can have multiple loads and combining this with retreading and the flow of the game of moving all around the map, load times can kill the pace of the game. Even going down a water slide has two loads, it is in the same fricken area. This is where Dead Rising’s tech is showing it’s age and neglect to solve this problem is bothersome. Engine wise there aren’t any new bells and whistles to showcase in this game. Area’s will reload the same way every time, the weapons laying around , windows, resources, will always load up the same way. Frame rate will drop substantially with outside environments and special effects. But the load times makes the pacing feel like a Playstation 1 title before developers had a better understanding of streaming and adequate level layouts. They also bring back the annoying text boxes while you are inside of the mission. All your dialog with survivors is handle with clunky real time text that you will most likely try to skip because zombies are trying to eat your brain while you are reading a badly written joke. There is no need for this since this a English speaking developer and having already hired voice talent makes it redundant to use highly annoying text boxes last seen in RPG’s 5 years ago.

Dead Rising 2 is still a decent game, it still has a value in it’s unique nature compared to cookie cutter third person shooters. Blue Castle Games could have brought so much more to this title, whether they were too scared to adventure out into new territory or pressured by Capcom to make the game they set the formula for. I like the new additions of Chuck, his motivation, and the few new tweaks. It is worth a play through if you never gotten through the original or want a conversation game. The end product comes down to a Canadian developer trying Japanese parody of American culture. You can see where the identity could be lost.

-Extra Notes:
    Multiple Endings - 2+ Endings Splitting at the end and other actions.

    Persistence Experience - Data Import From Dead Rising : Case Zero, Online Play,         Multiple Play throughs, will all bank experience into your main game.