Elliot Hyams reviews Capcom’s latest slice of survival horror.
Capcom’s Dead Rising was one of the standout computer games of 2006, continuing the survival horror theme championed by the Resident Evil games X-Box 360 owners were offered the chance to battle their way through a Dawn of the Dead style shopping centre fighting of hordes of the undead with whatever happened to come to hand, a chainsaw, a bench, even...well....a hand. Now four years later Dead Rising 2 has been unleashed on a hungry market. Whilst at first glance it may appear to be a case of simply more of the same, the truth is there has been a world of subtle changes that make this game superior to its predecessor. This time gamers take on the role of Chuck Greene, a survivor of the first outbreak struggling to make enough money to pay for his daughter’s Zombrex medication, the only thing that will stop her from turning into a zombie. This leads him to Fortune City where he takes part in the game show Terror is Reality. However all is not as it seems in Fortune City and it’s not long before the zombies are loose and Chuck is rescuing survivors, fighting psychopaths and searching for Zombrex.
Like the previous game Dead Rising 2 offers the player an immersive seventy hour experience in Fortune City, during that time you can complete missions to forward the main story, rescue survivors or just go on kill frenzies. However playing the missions unlocks new areas and items for exploration so it is recommended that this is the way you play on your first outing. Also like its predecessor PP can be gained from completing missions, rescuing survivors and killing zombies in large numbers. This gained PP allows the gamer to level up increasing life, attributes and adding new attacks to your repertoire. It would seem that the U.S.P for Dead Rising 2 is the ability to combine weapons to create new novelty weapons, a chainsaw combine with a rowing oar, a giant teddy bear combined with a machine gun, an axe combined with a sledgehammer. The graphics are top notch and the sometimes clunky controls of the first game have been improved dramatically.
Although the game is at first great fun the problem facing Dead Rising 2 is very much the same one that faced the last game, after a couple of hours of game play everything starts to feel very sameish, bosses and zombies alike can be beaten with ease once their simple patterns of attack have been mastered. Similarly the A.I of survivors hasn’t improved dramatically since the last game and it often proves a lot easier to just leave the idiots to die and get on with what you were doing in the first place. Where Dead Rising 2 redeems itself is in the online gamer co-op mode. Working your way through different versions of the story with friends is simply a lot of fun, but again once this has been done a few times there really is no need to go back and play again as with the fantastic Red Dead Redemption. In short Dead Rising 2 is fun and well worth a play, but it is probably better to rent it over a weekend than spend any hard earned cash on it.
Reviewed by Elliot Hyams
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