Dead Rising 2 Review

Dead Rising 2. What we’ve got here is an incredible scenario for a game, with a great engine and competent controls and graphics. You are a regular dude who is trapped in an area containing a mall, some casinos, and several scenic promenades. The area is teeming with brain-dead zombies, and modestly sprinkled with survivors, some of whom are friendly, others of whom are psychotic. You are technically free to explore whatever parts of the area you wish and in any order, and butcher masses of zombies with just about any object you can imagine, and some you probably wouldn’t have imagined. In this, the sequel, you can even combine weapons to invent incredible super-weapons like the “Drill Bucket”, which is a bucket you slam on zombies’ heads and it drills the heads until the heads explode. That’s Dead Rising 2 at its core. Freedom. Zombies. Innovation. Fun. Of course, given just those components, you’re left with something less than a game. A zombie playground, really. The question then becomes, did the sporadically talented boys at Capcom succeed in building a game around this core?

Sadly, I feel that the answer is “No.” Here is Dead Rising 2 the game: Placed in a playground full of zombies and fun weapons, you must constantly race against the clock to complete inane objectives, running excruciatingly slowly (until you level up a lot) to distant points on your map, often sitting through multiple long loading screens on the way. If you do not complete the objectives in time, you have failed the game’s primary story path and must either start the entire game over, load a previous save file, or just give up on seeing the story unfold altogether and play through the secondary missions while you await rescue. If you do complete your objectives, you will be treated to a few game-hours of downtime, which you are free to use as you wish–but be warned: your next deadline approaches. Don’t be tardy.

In many ways, Dead Rising 2 feels like middle school. Stuck in a compound overcrowded with man-eating monsters and psychopathic degenerates, your primary concern, somehow, is not being tardy. Your missions, like middle school assignments, rarely amount to more than busywork, and the game’s general interface, like middle school’s rules and regulations, is confusing and out of touch with the needs and concerns of the user.

Let’s talk about that interface.

To this day, many Japanese developers seem to insist on making save systems an element of gameplay rather than a flexible privilege that allows the loyal consumers of their products to carry on actual lives. Back in the original Resident Evil, players had to strategize when and where they saved their games, because the ability to do so was only allotted out in small portions–via typewriter ink cartridges. This was clever at first, but then it quickly dawned on players (read: me) that it was frustrating and dumb. The following player monologue illustrates why.

“Oh my god, this game is so scary and intense. I can’t take any more damage or I’ll die. I don’t have any green herbs to heal myself. I sure hope there are some left somewhere, seeing as how they are a finite commodity. Oh my god, six-thirty in the evening already? I have to go eat dinner and finish making that homemade birthday card for Grampa’s ninety-fourth birthday! Better go save without looking for those herbs. Oh wait, no ink left. Better go find some. . . . Okay, it took another hour and my mom is furious that I skipped the dinner she cooked me, but I found the ink. Now to save. Gah, monster! Get in the save room! All right, made it! Now I can save and quit. But next time I load the game I’ll be defenseless and there’s a monster right outside the room! Maybe I’d better start the entire game over.”

Just looking back on those days, I, for one, am repulsed. The stingy save system is and always has been a dumb, dumb idea. Dumber, even, than its increasingly common, pretentious next-of-kin, the Pause-less game. Now, survivors of the first Dead Rising game will recall that it had a similarly stingy save system, where you could only keep one file, which you were responsible for saving at your own discretion; if you saved yourself into an unsurvivable pickle, it was your own fault and your only option was to start the game over (albeit with your levels remaining intact). Granted you could save as often as you wanted, but only if you made it to a save point, which were located in bathrooms placed just a tad too sparsely considering how ever-present the danger was. Dead Rising 2 preserves the gist of this system, but lets you keep multiple files. Not a huge improvement, but I suppose every little bit helps. Still, I found myself wishing save points were more common (shops that would’ve likely had bathrooms in real life leave you suspiciously high and dry in the world of this game) and more clearly marked with radar or something. They are marked on your map, but that means you have to repeatedly switch back and forth between your map and the game, or else just memorize the locations of every bathroom, because the game is also stingy about map beacons, which brings me to my next point.

The map system is bad. In the middle of the map is a pulsating yellow beacon with an arrow jutting out of it. The yellow beacon is you. The arrow seems to indicate what direction you’re facing. But moving the left analog stick around reveals that this arrow is an unrelated map cursor, while the arrow that actually indicates the direction you’re facing is under where that arrow was. You only have to learn this once, but when you’re in the heat of battle with a swarm of zombies and you frantically call up your map to figure out where to save, and you immediately see your character icon with a giant arrow over it pointing in a direction, you’re likely to think that arrow represents you, and then proceed to run, excruciatingly slowly, mind you, in the wrong direction for awhile. Also, the map allows you to select a mission, to which a big, in-game arrow will guide you, but it will only guide you to the mission starting point, and not to successive destinations within that mission. This is a big problem during escort missions (which are in exceedingly unwanted abundance). Once you’ve found a survivor to be escorted, the guide arrow will automatically move on to the next mission starting point instead of to your escort destination. You’re left checking the map over and over because you can’t just place a beacon where you need to go. Maybe checking the map isn’t so bad, but when you’re playing in online co-op mode, checking the map forces every player’s game to suddenly pause, which I found out the embarrassing way. So in other words, you can’t really check your map during co-op without irritating everybody. That means you can’t save unless you’ve memorized where the save points are or happen to stumble upon one. It also means you’re likely to miss a lot of deadlines and fail the entire game miserably. These are all terrible, terrible features.

But the thing is, all of these things were apparently conscious decisions made by the developers, because people complained the first time around and they changed almost nothing. I’ve heard that they were trying to make a game where players would feel “responsible for their actions.” Touché, Capcom. It’s true. You have to really learn your way around the environments. You have to remember to save. You have to stick to schedule. You have to stockpile health items. It’s a lot like being stuck in a zombie-infested hell. And if you don’t like it, well, the game’s not forcing you to do anything. Just scrap the story missions and have a ball. You can still level up, and they’ll still even give you an ending, just out of the kindness of their hearts. They’ll even let you dress up like a Servbot and run through a sea of zombies with a lawnmower. Heck, there’s bound to be a certain group of people who will love the structure of this game and cherish it as a rare gem. And frankly, if there’s one thing reviewing this game has taught me, it’s that, in spite of an abundance of evidence pointing to the contrary, I’m probably just not what you would call a “hardcore” gamer, in the sense that I feel pain. So maybe when I say the game is punishing, abusive, and altogether too comfortable with its own shortcomings, maybe I’m not to be taken seriously by many of you. But I will just advise this: play with caution, for this game is not what it seems.

Highly recommended to fans Demon’s Souls and the original Dead Rising. Lowly recommended to fans of anything else that’s come out in the last four years.

Other Great Stuff: