Dead Rising 2 Hands-On Preview

24 Aug 2010 at 17:00:00 by James Chalmers

Dead Rising was an interesting concept from Capcom. Featuring hundreds of zombies, a wide variety of weapons and a camera happy protagonist the game was a breath of fresh air and showed the true processing power of the Xbox 360 in Microsoft's early days. However the game featured numerous frustrating features such as a very limited save system, a non-friendly approach to HDTV-less gamers and a lack of multitasking when it came to talking on the receiver and attacking.

So here we are with Dead Rising 2, a brand new developer has taken the reigns, a new main character has been thrown into the mix and Dead Rising 2 promises to be a bigger, better version of its predecessor. But can it live up to the hype? Or does the latest build just leave us cowering in the corner expecting to be mauled to death by the vying zombies of Fortune City as the game falls into the sequel horror genre?

Taking the role of Motocross champion Chuck Greene, you arrive in the glitzy and glamourous fictitious gambling town of Fortune City, read Las Vegas, to compete in the sadistic games show “Terror Is Reality”. However after a sabotage on the zombie holding pen the whole of Fortune City has been over-ran by thousands of zombies. It's down to Chuck and a strong selection of eccentric characters that you meet along the way to survive for three days until the military can come and rescue the straggling survivors.

After Chuck is framed for the sabotage you soon stumble upon Channel 6 reporter Rebecca Chang who is adamant of uncovering the truth of the Fortune City outbreak. The sassy reporter is willing to go to any lengths to get the story and the sexual chemistry between Rebecca and Chuck is obvious from the moment they meet. But at a time like this when can you think about getting the journalist in bed when you have a zombie outbreak?

The cast of characters continues to grow throughout the game as you rescue members of the public and while some of the characters will just be grateful to be alive, others will vow to help you find out what has happened before the 72 hours runs out. Whether they can all be trusted is another thing though but when there is a small contingent of the living and a mass horde of zombies you're going to need all the help you can get.

One of the other main characters is Stacey the leader of the CURE, to the less educated it stands for Citizens for Undead Rights and Equality, she also seems to take a keen interest in Chuck, as well as his infected daughter Katey. A previous zombie attack has left Katey needing the medication Zombrex every 24 hours to prevent her turning into one of the walking dead. Throughout the game you see the true lengths a father is prepared to go for his daughter's life including taking on a gang of looters in the pharmacy after they reject Chuck's request for one vial of Zombrex. However, to find this precious and valuable medication you're going to have to search high and wide throughout Fortune City.

But that's not going to be an easy feat especially with Fortune City being so huge; despite my best efforts I still failed to explore every square inch of the map but I can assure you the variety in locations is impressive. Obviously there will be the casinos that provide the backbone to this busy and infested world however that's not all. Expect to be exploring a construction site, taking refuge inside the Fortune City Hotel and also battling waves upon waves of zombies in not one, but two shopping malls.

As if you didn't have enough fun in the malls during the first Dead Rising, Capcom has decided to up the ante for the scale of this game and create a mall almost the same size of the original game as just one of the zones for the game. Expect a huge array of shops to explore and I would be here all day if I tried to include them all in this preview, but expect to see kitchen utensil suppliers, sport shops, jewellers and even the ludicrous hat shops.

Each shop offers players the opportunity to stock up on weapons, snacks or even change Chuck's attire to the most silly outfits including a Street Fighter Blanka mask. These little cameos continue to pop-up throughout the game including Katey playing Megaman on a handheld console suspiciously looking like a PSP, while posters of Playboy Issues litter the casino walls as the lovely playmates create a quick distraction for you as you decapitate the hundredth zombie in a row.

Rest Rooms are also scattered throughout the world, these count as your save points within the game and Dead Rising 2 takes the same route that frustrated numerous players of the original. The game doesn't have an auto-save feature, you have to manually find your way to these restrooms to save your progress otherwise all that exploration you've just spent an hour doing is going to be worth nothing. The lack of an auto save is one that baffles me, too many times I turned off the console in anger after having to restart the mission yet again. It wouldn't have been too bad if the loading times weren't so long and frequent. More on that after the break.

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