Dead Rising 2

Dead Rising 2 has you in the boots of Chuck Greene an ex-motocross star who is on a reality show in Fortune City (the game’s version of Las Vegas) that has its contestants killing zombies for sport to pay for Zombrex, a drug that his daughter requires daily to prevent her from turning into a zombie. Also, you’ve been framed for unleashing the zombie hoard on Fortune City. So you have 72 hours to clear your name and rescue your daughter before the army arrives to clean up the mess.

And Capcom is not kidding when they mean 72 hours. All missions in the game are time-based giving you a limited duration to clear them which is extremely annoying when you have a million zombies to plough through. Miss something important and you’d have no choice but to restart the game from the beginning, albeit with all your equipment and stats before you were caught unawares.

Another thing that will catch you unawares is the combat which is slow and repetitive. While you can end up making some crazy weapons from available materials such as a hand grenade attached to a football and wheelchairs with chainsaws, the controls are clunky rendering the gameplay slower than it should be.

In terms of presentation it’s a lumbering mess with the game being laggy, the load times were exceptionally long and due to the sheer scale the developers were aiming for, Dead Rising 2 looks quite less than ordinary. Plus the much touted co-operative mode is full of glitches so much so that trying to save the game results in the other player being kicked out. To top it all off, the save system is as abysmal as it was in the first game with no auto-saving, making each mission a desperate dash to find the nearest save point. Throw in some pathetic friendly AI (in terms of survivors who you are tasked with rescuing), poorly conceived boss battles and the aforementioned time restrictions and you have a recipe for disaster that only hardcore horror fans would love.

All in all, Dead Rising 2 does very little to correct any of the problems that its predecessor had ensuring that it is just a highly average game at best and a shambling, zombified work-in-progress at worst.