Dead Rising 2 a Non-Review
I am not in the business of not finishing games. Actually, in this line of work finishing games is a necessity. However, when slaving through Dead Rising 2, I found that I had more to say about not finishing the game than I would ever have to say in an official review. I know that already says a lot about the game but there’s a few things you need to know about the game before purchase. Here’s why I will probably never finish Dead Rising 2.
Its not the archaic save mechanic (as annoying as it is), its not the time limit (though that seems a bit artificially and unnecessarily added), and its not even the cumbersome item combo system, the problem with Dead Rising is that it takes an interesting concept and actively makes it uninteresting. I don’t have the same love affair with Zombies that seemingly the rest of America has, but I understand the appeal of someone being trapped alone in a zombie infested mall.
There is something primal about the need to survive in an intense and dangerous situation. Dead Rising, as a franchise, nearly strips itself of the intensity of the setting by giving its games a deliberate hokey-ness. This leads to very hit or miss comedy throughout. The story that is being pushed throughout DR2 tries juxtaposing a serious tone to the absurdity that is the gameplay and it leaves the game feeling disjointed in many ways.
Still, this is not enough to put the game down. The layout of the three day timeframe puts critical story moments timed to happen at certain points in the timeline. This creates a linear story progression. Everything else, side bosses, achievements, leveling up, and learning item combos are done almost completely outside of the story arc. With the open world setup of the game, and the side missions being aggravatingly far away from safe room, doing anything marked on the world map is a hassle.
Dead Rising 2 takes everything fun about open world games and throws them out the window. Games like Infamous, Prototype, Assassin’s Creed 2 created a traversal system that makes getting from one point to another fun. Dead Rising’s lumbering zombies every ten feet only add an obstruction to jog around that is more of a nuisance than it is a enemy. Decent weapons are only found in certain areas and item combos are neat but turn out to be wholly unnecessary. Just outside of the safe house you can easily created 2 spiked bats and they will last most of your trip throughout the mall. Also, the more complex item combos take a lot of searching for ingredients and in the end only yield a single shot weapon or a weapon that whenever you get touched by a zombie you drop it. With the number of zombies on screen not getting touched when trying to complete a task is nearly impossible.
The survivors you are saving through the game are smart enough to fend for themselves, but they aren’t smart enough to open doors on their own. You can be chugging through a corridor trying to guide 5 survivors to the safe house and everytime you step through a door, you hit a load screen. Some of your survivors may not be standing close enough to you to join you through the door, so you have to go back through the door to gather the idiot too dumb to use a doorknob. This adds triple load times and while they are trapped behind the unlocked door zombies continue to attack them.
Chuck the main character of the game’s daughter has been bitten by a zombie and is in danger of turning. Chuck must get give her Zombrex once every 24 hours to stave off the infection. The speed at which he travels is torturously slow. With his daughter in danger, you would think that he would be in more of a hurry to get around the mall. As your character levels up he gets faster, but getting to a speed that is more than a powerwalk takes entirely too many levels and adds to the frustration of the open world. It also doesn’t help that to get from the safe house to the action it takes about 3 minutes, even longer if you stop to make a few spiked bats. This wouldn’t be a problem if the timer wasn’t in place.
The PC version of Dead Rising 2 (the version I played) literally shipped unfinished. As stated on the box of the PC game, it is supposed to support the Xbox 360 controller for Windows. I have lovingly used this function in other Games for Windows Live games, but it simply does not work in DR2. The menus are in the game and you can even invert the axises on the non-existent controller, but to activate the controller a non Microsoft/Capcom emulator has to be downloaded and installed. The emulator works with the game and it gets the job done, but as you might have heard on the Techpedition podcast, it can be a pain to install. I have also found that the emulator is not as responsive as it should be. Chuck sometimes doesn’t attack when asked and he sometimes can’t change directions quickly with the emulator. A patch has not been released and your average person, probably doesn’t know how to fix the problem. This is simply unacceptable.
The semi-precious commodity in Dead Rising 2 is Zombrex. As stated before, Chuck needs it to save his daughter. Zombrex can be found or bought. It gets more expensive each time you buy it, making finding the Zombrex the smarter way to go. However, if you don’t feel like figuring out which missions get you Zombrex, you can play the competitive multiplayer zombie slaughtering party game “Terror Is Reality” online to earn cash that imports into your save game. This effectively devalues the Zombrex and adds to the disjointedness of the story.
Probably the most obnoxious part of Dead Rising 2 is that the side bosses are deliberately harder than you can defeat in your first playthrough. Any time you die, you are asked if you would like to start from your previous save or from the being of the story at the current experience level you have reached. Many people would see that as a motivating factor to playthrough the game again. For me it was motivation to not play it at all. With the side boss missions being timed like the rest of the game and their defeat yielding a hefty helping of XP, killing the side bosses is a big deal. Forcing the player to slave through the painfully monotonous pace of the game and story just to get to a level that can stand up to the side bosses is not how I want to be asked to replay the game. Hey Capcom, if your game was fun I would want to play it more. Inserting a tarnished game mechanic just pisses me off and has me playing something else.
Overall, Dead Rising 2 simply isn’t fun, and very much a chore to play. Its is made for crazy people and 12 year olds. Its too bad that its rated M because that means it can only officially appeal to crazy people. I say that if you still want to play DR2 after reading this you should pick up Dead Rsing Case Zero on Xbox Live for $5 first. It will give you a Cliff’s Notes version of this oddly designed mess of a game.
