Dead Rising 2
Review
Thousands of zombies to whack off
by Chris Davis
reviewed on X360
Fun for Not Just One
One of the biggest features added to the Dead Rising experience the multiplayer. Dead Rising 2 gives the player roughly everything they’d want and more in a multiplayer experience. The first half of the multiplayer comes in the form of full drop-in, drop-out cooperative play. Though limited to online-only play, co-op allows you to drop in your Chuck from your own campaign (story elements are not saved for the joining partner) and help someone else out in their campaign. Having a partner significantly decreases the trial and error nature of the game and makes for a more entertaining experience all around but there still is something to be said for experiencing the campaign alone.
The other half of the online experience is the Terror is Reality game show Chuck participated in at the start of the game. Consisting of eight different events, up to four players can compete to earn cash that can be used in their own campaigns. The most notable ones are actually vehicular in nature with the biggest standout being Ramsterball which has you squishing zombies by the horde from within a giant hamster ball. Though there is very little reason to actually play Terror is Reality other than to accumulate extra cash it is a fun diversion from the single player antics.
The one downside of the multiplayer is that Network issues are numerous right now but, given that this is the launch week, we can probably look forward to a fix for these soon.
Send More Paramedics
Dead Rising was a first year title for the Xbox 360 and limited in scope and design. The first game to utilize Capcom’s MT Framework engine, it was still a pretty game with an ugly protagonist (though Frank’s final design was a significant improvement on his original). With Dead Rising 2 Blue Castle decided to utilize a custom engine (MT Framework has been restricted until recently to in-house development teams). The results?
For the lack of a better pun, the new engine hits the classic Dead Rising feeling dead on. Though the camera has been drawn in just a bit, it is dynamic and can shift away from the player in certain situations such as when being surrounded by a pack of zombies. The animations in the game look exactly like they did in the first game, though admittedly Chuck at first is a bit slow and lumbering. This changes as you level up the character but it does give the impression that he is slower overall than Frank was. The on-screen zombie count, amounting to a strong eight hundred at a time in Dead Rising, has been upped to a tremendous seven thousand in the new game. Though you never see anything near that number, you do get a sense of the engine being capable of that, especially when playing in an area at night.
With every custom engine there come some quirks and Dead Rising 2 is no exception - there is noticeable pop-in but it is certainly not gamebreaking. One issue that has afflicted this writer is that, upon installation to the Xbox 360 hard drive the game tends to take as much as ten seconds before initiating loading and saving operations. In game this isn’t a problem when loading up individual sectors of the map, but at the main menu it can take a noticeable amount of time. Despite multiple reinstallations the problem still persists. This is probably an isolated issue but it makes me question whether the game was optimized for hard drive installation versus disc streaming.
Chop Till You Drop
Dead Rising 2 is a game with almost no competitors. In an age in which zombie games are becoming as commonplace as World War II games were less than a decade ago, it is still surprising that no one has developed on Capcom’s original formula. Despite that, Dead Rising 2 is a great improvement on the first game and is a near-required play for zombiholics. It is fair to argue that Dead Rising 2 is to Dead Rising what Assassin’s Creed II was to Assassin’s Creed and if you understand how much an improvement that game was then you most certainly understand how strong a product this is.
8.5
fun score
Pros
Great improvement of the ideas of the original
Cons
Some graphical quirks, not as innovative as it could have been
