Reviews// Dead Rising 2

You'll also have to keep a close eye on what weapons and items you're carrying. Although everything from fire axes to beachballs can be used as weapons, some of those are, as you might expect, more useful than others.

Getting pinned down in the mall with only bracelets and dinner trays as weapons and not a scrap of food to boost your health is not a right cracking idea. It's particularly pertinent to keep an eye on your inventory given that boss battles or big set pieces are not really signposted. You don't want to hit a big encounter with nothing to your name.

That said, dying and reloading becomes part of the ebb and flow of the game. You'll plough along through a mission, realise that you've been going about it all wrong, die a bloody, brain-chewed death, then do it all over again with a better idea of how to get it right. DR2 certainly doesn't hold your hand.

Although the range of weapons offers a decent amount of variety, the combat feels a bit slow and turgid at times. The more potent, heavier melee weapons take a little while to swing and I often found myself button-mashing in frustration.

Similarly, the set piece action sequences offer variety with vehicles and gunplay coming to the fore, but handle a little sluggishly. The vehicle handling's fairly poor and the shooting mechanics feel a little clunky and inaccurate.

The pace of the game is also hampered horribly by loading screens and cutscenes. There are huge chunks of the game where you seem to spend at least as much time staring blankly at the screen with idle thumbs as you do getting stuck in.

That's particularly a problem given that DR2 has sandbox elements, with the mission structure taking the familiar route of core tasks expanded on by side quests. Having a decent-sized game world to explore is all well and good, but when you're interrupted by a loading sequence every time you go through a door exploration becomes cumbersome.

Graphically DR2 is fine. Capcom gets definite points for the vast number of zombies on screen at one time, but otherwise the tongue-in-cheek presentation and design is unremarkable. Not bad, just unremarkable.

Likewise, the plot and voice acting are serviceable, if not particularly inspiring. I certainly didn't get sucked in. At one point I failed to deliver Katey's zombrex injection and was fairly disappointed that I had to reload the last checkpoint rather than carrying on without her. That's how invested in the characters I was.

DR2 also offers two-player co-op in which you can get a mate online to help you hit some walking corpses in the brain. Because zombie-fighting on your own is dangerous.

Conclusion
Dead Rising 2 suffers from massively excessive loading times and combat that could do with a bit of a spit-polish. Beyond that, satisfaction to be had from sticking a drill bucket on a zombie's head or running a horde of them over on a pink tricycle. This game will punish you, though. You have to think hard about what you're doing and be prepared to put in the time to repeat sections and explore a bit. If you're game for that, give DR2 a pop. Otherwise, you'll find it massively frustrating and its flaws will glare at you.

SPOnG Score: 73%