Dead Rising 2
Thriller
To my left a man wearing a red handkerchief top and denim hot pants pushes a zombie in a wheelchair into other zombies, the undead toppling over like bowling pins. Just left of him some other zombies cower from a succession of golf balls being launched at them by what appears to be Elvis with a Blanka mask on. To my right a fruit machine takes a beating from a golf club. It's a typical mid-morning here in Leicester Square - or in actuality a press event for the upcoming Dead Rising 2.
And of course it is, really. Arguably the silliest game of this generation, Dead Rising has not matured an iota over the years. Its sequel is just as hell-bent on you performing zombie genocide in the stupidest fashion possible - method and attire - this time with more zombies, weapons, and chest hair.
Some things have changed. Gone is Frank West avec camera - too busy appearing in other Capcom games - and in his stead the only slightly handsomer Chuck Greene. Players of the Xbox Live prequel Case Zero will be well aware of Chuck's back story, but in short he's an ex-motocross champ who now takes part in a gruesome reality show called Terror is Reality. Imagine if those clips at the end of Shaun of the Dead involved motorbikes with saw blades attached and you have a good idea of Chuck's day job - a bit like MadWorld but without Greg Proops.
Unfortunately, someone somewhere screws up as is their wont and Fortune City becomes overrun with zombies and then quarantined from the rest of the world. The military suspect that that someone somewhere is our very own Chuck, leaving the biker with 72 hours to survive, prove his innocence, and work out who's framing him. To compound matters, his young daughter Katey is in constant need of Zombrex to avoid succumbing to the infection's ill effects, meaning Chuck has to somehow find some every 12 hours otherwise the widower will lose another member of his family to the virus.
The reveal of 72 hours sets the tone for what are minimal, incremental changes to the Dead Rising structure. When he's not slam dunking zombies with a potted plant or knocking them over with a little pink tricycle, Chuck has to complete objectives scattered around the Vegas-like complex he's trapped in. Some of these are tied to the main objectives and may have to be completed at a set time, like getting Katey some Zombrex, while others are optional ones that crop up. These side missions are typically things like helping stranded survivors find safety, but a few present a different kind of distraction. Early on you'll bump into your motocross rival, which leads to what can only be described as mass road kill.
Just like before, the key to success is making sure you keep track of time and don't take too much on. Indeed, some things haven't changed a bit. There's the same standard attack, special attack, and left trigger aim for combat, and survivors still need to be told every five seconds to follow you around. But feedback has sifted through; instead of one dangerously lone save file, Dead Rising thankfully has three.
Other things have multiplied, like the zombies, the weapons, and the array of gear to be found. Dead Rising 2 is swimming in enemies now, a Vegas-themed cake brimming over with undead fudge. That only exacerbates how surprisingly tricky the game is. For every trolley you create a line of devastation with there's a chair that breaks after one swipe at decomposed cranium. Inventory management is important and the novelty of more amusing weapons is tempered by hefty punishment for death as well as fair distance between save points. While melee remains gratifyingly simple for your pick-up-and-play friend, say, there's a fair deal of skill and intelligence required for your campaign-completing self.
Thankfully Chuck has one extra trick up his sleeve thanks to some apparently nifty engineering skills. Finding Combo Cards scattered around and discarded by fallen foes, Chuck can combine i.e. beat together two of the weapons he finds to make one bigger, better, and more badass piece of gear. The example the game uses to introduce this is a spiked bat (nails + baseball bat = spiked bat). It's unsurprisingly significantly more brutal than your regular bat, but it also generates more PP from a successful dispatch, PP being what you need to collect to upgrade stats as you progress. A more entertaining creation which I discovered later was the electric chair (wheelchair + battery), this producing the spectacular sight of a zombie being ejector-seated into a sea of undead only to cause a massive explosion. This is the kind of electric chair I can get behind, quite literally.
Maybe it just sounds like a brief novelty, and in many ways that's exactly what each successful combination is, but Dead Rising 2 is full of these brief novelties. In the few hours I had with the game I kept discovering stuff, from my motocross bike to a challenge involving a giant rotating sphere like they used to have on Gladiators. Having said that, with the core combat and structure remaining so true to its predecessor, there's a possibility that it will prove more of a Marmite affair. But if you've been waiting over the years for more zombies to take out in an array of amusing ways, counting down the days, nay, hours until you could throw more CDs at the undead, then Dead Rising 2 isn't likely to disappoint.
