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This review was submitted by Mathew Gray. If you’ve played Dead Rising 2, or just want to ask Mathew more about it, leave your thoughts in the comments below.
Dead Rising 2
Ready your Baseball Bats, MMA gloves, Lawnmowers, Parasols, Casino Chips and golf clubs, Because Dead Rising 2 is finally out, and it’s first outing on PC. Is it up to scratch? Let’s find out.
Loved
Weapons: One of the main draws of Dead Rising is the sheer amount of weapons you can use on the zombie hordes in the game. Fire Axes, Broadswords, Cash Registers, anything you can pick up can be used to carve your path through a group of zombies.
[imgclear] Most weapons are great, some are useless, but all are hilarious to use. The new addition to the weapons lineup includes Combo Cards., which allow you to combine 2 weapons into a new one. Boxing Gloves + Motor Oil = Flaming boxing gloves, booyeah!
Make your own fun: One of the things I find myself getting lost in is just roaming around the various malls and casino’s just doing stupid things. You can loot stores, try on clothes, play various minigames for cash, mix drinks, play slots, and just lose yourself in finding new things. Most of the game’s draw is just finding new and stupid things to do, and making your own fun.
Co-Op: This is where the game shines. Get a friend, (preferably one with a good sense of humor) and go nuts. I wasted 5 hours in one night doing co-op with a friend, and we didn’t even attempt to make any sort of progression through the main story, we just messed around for 5 hours straight, and it is probably one of the best co-op experiences I’ve ever had in a game. We trashed stores, we had ketchup fights, we dressed up like lumberjacks and slaughtered a few hundred zombies with Battleaxes, we got mauled by a tiger, we pushed each other around in wheelchairs, raided a gunshop and played with sniper rifles, hung out in a casino’s security room and got drunk, and spent all of the night laughing at the crazy stuff we could do.
Hated
Underpowered: At the start of the game, you are really weak, to the point of it being crippling. I know the whole point of having a leveling system in place is to have a sense of your character growing over time, but the game seems to really crawl along at the lower levels, and necessitates ignoring the main story and most of the bosses until you have a few levels under your belt.
Time Limit: it seems like you have 2 options when it comes to the time limit: Stick to it, or Ignore it completely, there isn’t a middle ground. It would be nice to have an option of disabling the time limit to mess around, similar to GTA IV’s sleep mode of the Phone. Because rescuing survivors, completing missions and finding your daughter’s anti-zombie EpiPen leaved very little time for you to go messing about.
Overall, it’s well worth the money, especially if you have a friend who will join you for the fun.
Reviewed by: Mathew Gray
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