Contrary to what the name and the images may suggest, Dead Rising2 is not a survival horror game. There are no eerie secluded locations and no suspenseful missions. This is instead a survival action, zombie-killing hackfest, where environments are brightly lit and the zombies are nothing more than target practice. You’ll find zombies, or ‘the infected’ as they’re called, in hordes everywhere you go, but they’re so slow that most of the time you can just run through them, killing a few on the way if you’re in the mood for some dismemberment or blunt-force trauma. It’s the video game equivalent of Shaun of the Dead.
Though killing zombies isn’t the main objective of the game, it does make it a very enticing activity nonetheless, thanks to the near endless selection of weapons and means by which you can bring the undead some serious pain. Pretty much every object you find lying around, from sledgehammers and chainsaws to stuffed teddy bears and remote-controlled toy helicopters can be used as weapons, more for your amusement and entertainment than anything else.
And rest assured; you will be entertained. But taking the fun to a whole new level are the combo cards, which you will earn as you complete missions and level up. Combo cards allow you to combine two objects to create a deadly weapon. In our play time, we earned two combo cards; the first was the spiked bat, which was a baseball bat with nails in it, and the second was the drill bucket, an ingenious combination of a bucket and a hand drill, which serves as lethal headgear for one unfortunate infected.
As much fun as mowing down zombies with wheelchairs and laundry baskets is, there is actually a story in Dead Rising 2. The protagonist, Chuck Greene, has been falsely accused of causing the zombie outbreak, and it’s his mission to clear his name before the military reaches the city in three days’ time. All this while, he must also look after his daughter, who has been bitten by one of the infected. Once every day, he must administer an antidote called Zombrex to stop his daughter from getting infected. There are side missions too, such as rescuing non-infected humans and bringing them back to the safe house.
Every now and then there will be boss battles too. At the end of our time with the game, we played one such battle, which was against one of Chuck’s reality TV show co-stars – a blood-thirsty maniac riding a motorcycle with two chainsaws strapped to the front. The game plays out over a period of three days, so you don’t really have time on your side. This is also represented in the mission design, whereby each mission lasts a limited amount of time, before which it must be completed.
One thing that really impresses in Dead Rising 2 is the amount of content, variety and customization that’s possible. Besides using pretty much every object as a weapon and being able to combine weapons, you can even walk into clothing stores around the mall – the location of the safehouse, and try on the clothes. Just for kicks, you can have Chuck go on killing sprees wearing a dress and riding a tricycle. But there is one big downside to the game - the lack of checkpoints. The game can only be saved manually and that too at fixed locations i.e. restrooms. Most missions require you to leave the safe house, perform a particular task, and come back, and very often this can take up to 45 minutes. Dying in the latter stages of such missions and having to start over can get frustrating. But from what we’ve played of Dead Rising 2 so far, the positives far outweigh the negatives, and we can’t wait to get our hands on the full game when it hits stores in late September.
