Dead Rising 2

Dear Dead Rising 2.  I've tried.  I really have. 


I normally don't like to give my opinion on something before I've finished it and I do intend to finish this game.  If something mindblowingly good happens between now and the end of the game, I'll post a nice big revision to this article.  But I doubt it.

The dead rising games are perhaps the perfect example of why Zombies need to go away for a while (that's without mentioning even worse games like Dead Island)  Zombies are our go to enemies.  You need a low level bad guy?  Hey, zombies.  You need a horde in massive numbers to throw at the player?  Hey, zombies!

Zombies were scary once.  I remember.  The early resident evil games would usually manage some pretty damn good scares and they weren't the only ones.

But along the way something got lost.  We stopped being scared.  Zombies became a joke.  That's what the dead rising series is.  An extended slapstick routine with zombies as the punchline.  In dead rising you're encouraged to treat the zombies with violence in massive numbers, the more you kill the better.  The more creatively you do so, the more points.

So you weigh through the horde, slicing and dicing with minimal challenge.  It turns the fight against one of Horror's most famous monsters and makes it dull.  Zombies are scary for many reasons, but at least a major part of it is the theme of lost humanity.  It's this loss of humanity that Romero used to mock consumerism in Dawn of The Dead, a film that both games owe a huge debt to. (although it's worth noting that Dead Rising 2 lifts pretty heavily from the much later and infinitely worse Land Of The Dead as well)

You soldier on, using a wide variety of weapons, but ultimately achieving very little.  Other than the mass zombie slaughter, the game has only a few good ideas and most of them are wasted.  The time factor for instance makes things interesting, but checking your watch doesn't pause the game which means you can only do it in relative safety.  The hunting for zombrex is interesting but then the annoyingly specific timing means you'll likely spend a good few hours hanging around the homebase for fear of missing it.

It's just so lifeless and dull.  None of the characters seem particularly emotionally affected by what's happening around them.  Your character is a calm, cool, boring hero which runs entirely at odds with his behaviour when guided by the player.  It's simply not a particularly satisfying game.

Posted in: dawn of the dead, dead rising, dead rising 2, Game, Game Review, land of the dead, romero, zombie