Dead Rising 2

As far as IP's go, there's very few developers that contain the most powerhouses than Capcom (except maybe Nintendo but I mean more 3rd party ones). From Street Fighter, Mega Man, Resident Evil, Devil May Cry and Monster Hunter, they've certainly got many a franchise with huge appeal and the same goes with sales. It's just their new IP's that tend to be hit or miss as for every Phoenix Wright and Dead Rising you have the last Bionic Commando and Dark Void which failed to do much of anything critically or otherwise. Along with Lost Planet 2 this year, the sequel to the surprise hit Dead Rising is out and manages to fix many things that people weren't a big fan of in the first game. But improvements only go so far as some things are still an issue and that ultimately is kind of the problem and yet being the surprise thing about Dead Rising 2: for everything that frustrates you, something happens that will put a huge smile on your face.
 
Taking place several years after the first game and even a couple more after the recent downloadable game "Case Zero", DR2 centers on Chuck Greene, a motocross racer who finds himself framed for unleashing the infected zombie horde onto Fortune City and he's got to repel waves of the undead as he discovers the truth. But that's not all as his daughter Katey is infected and the only thing keeping it at bay is Zombrex which Chuck will have to find in the malls and casinos nearby to keep her alive before the military rescue arrives in 3 days. And as always, crazy survivors can be found in your travels that are more than willing to make your stay in Fortune City unwelcome.
 
The story of Dead Rising 2 is serviceable but it's not altogether memorable and seems more of a good vehicle for progression for your character rather than a compelling reason to revisit the game. See, the problem with the game in a sense is the same thing that the first game ran into: you could restart the story but retain all your experience points and money you've acquired so you're a bigger badass the next go-around however because there's a story attached to it, you'll end up re-seeing the same dialogue and cutscenes, and re-seeing the same survivors roaming the malls so minute you restart, guarantee you that pregnant black woman and her cowardly husband will be right in front of me making the game too deja-vu for its own good.
 
However, it's the levelling and the building of your character that really makes the game kick into high gear and it's mainly due to the combo cards. The core mechanic behind the game is combining 2 weapons using duct tape (or as we say in Canada, to "Red Green" it if you've watched the show) and you'll end up with some kind of kooky setup. It starts off simple: nails + baseball = spiked bat. Machete + broom = a big blade you can swing around and chop zombies in half. But then you run into things like combining gems and a flashlight to create a lightsaber...oh sorry, a "laser sword" if you don't wanna get sued, or a car battery attached to a rake to make an electrified rake. As you level up you obtain combo cards which not only help you out on the combinations but allow you XP bonuses when you use it as well as given weapons an added attack. For instance, a 2x4 plus a lawn mower, equals a portable motor you just swing around but once you find the combo card you can slice up a zombie head to toe as you pull down the weapon over their head. It's gruesome, hilarious and reeks of awesomeness and discovering why certain items have the wrench icon and what they can be combined with makes for good fun.
 
What isn't fun however, is specifically 2 things. One are the psychopaths, or in other words, the "boss fights" of the game as they're not hard, they're just cheap and at times I specifically avoided fighting them or tracked down a good strategy online to how to deal with them to save myself some frustration. However, these give you bonuses like combo cards but thanks to the game's design of story restarts, you can just beat them up some other playthrough. But the big issue I have is the save system which has been slightly tweaked from Dead Rising 1 but not enough. In the first game, it was very easy to screw yourself over by saving in a spot where a critical mission was way too far to get to, either forcing a restart or just abandoning it. Dead Rising 2 allows 3 save slots compared to DR's 1 but the game doesn't do one thing which is autosave. Entering a new area or rescuing stranded survivors does not yield a save and only in specific missions will there be a prompt to save and continue your game and it's very easy to do some good work, discover some combos only to die and find out just how far back you'll have to go should you not want to restart the whole story. So let that be a recommendation to everyone: save often.
 
Dead Rising 2 is easily better than the first one but it's still not a perfected franchise as some things in its design still prevent from being for lack of a better word, a "killer" IP for Capcom and while I'm sure it will sell well, this and along with Lost Planet, probably won't go into the echelon of the best franchises Capcom has to offer but they're still a hell of a lot of fun. If you don't get any fun out of a teddy bear carrying an LMG then this game ain't for you.