‘Dead Rising 2’: A Retrospective

Video Games

Aug 28

In the pantheon of zombie games, one of the more interesting is the Dead Rising series. Set in a world where zombies have taken over, one of the main things that makes it stick out is the ability to craft weapons out of everyday objects to fight the undead hoard

My personal favorite is combining a flashlight and jewelry to create essentially a lightsaber.

I admit that I never played the first one (I got 2 and 3 when I shared Steam accounts with my brother) but I’ve played through the second one, released in 2010, almost twice. Since I write for this site, I figured I might as well go ahead and give it a retrospective to see how well it actually holds up. It has pretty decent reviews overall, with a mostly positive review total from Steam and generally about 8/10 from professional reviewers, but does it hold up? Is it worth taking a look if you haven’t played it already?

Eh… it’s… fine, I guess.

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The story follows Chuck Greene, a performer in a controversial show where he competes with other riders to kill hordes of zombies with chainsaws attached to motorcycles. When the zombies used for the event escape, Chuck is the main suspect and is forced to investigate the main cause of the outbreak, gather as many survivors as he can, and keep his daughter safe. Not a bad story for a game at all, and it’s pretty engaging at first to try to unravel what is going on while slaughtering the undead. However, it starts to get really, really repetitive. The game breaks down into three main components: escort missions for survivors, the main story, and fighting psychopaths who have gone insane from the events of the outbreak. Buuut mostly the escort missions.

One of the big issues with the game is that a lot of those escort missions are mixed in with another type of gameplay that a ton of gamers just hate: fetch quests. “I know the zombies are surrounding us and could kill us at any second and you’re here to take me someplace they won’t get me, but I need you to do this inane thing for me first, or I’m staying in this undefensible toy store!” “I could come with you to someplace safe, but I need you to get me a golf club first!” Then when you do get them to come with you, most of them aren’t able to fight back, so not only are you forced to lead them back to your safehouse, which can often be on the other side of the map, but you’re constantly saving them as well. And you’d better be careful about it, because you can end up accidentally killing them, too. But you need to do the escort missions/fetch quests if you want to get a ton of experience to level up, because despite the fact that you’re a trained athlete who has years of experience fighting zombies, you start the game about as strong as wet tissue paper. My six-year-old can carry more stuff and move faster than Chuck at the start of the game.

The psychopaths are another part of the game that are just terrible. There are two types of difficult enemies: the type that are difficult for an in-universe reason and you need all of your wit and skill to defeat them, and ones that are difficult… because. The psychopaths in DR2 sprint straight into the latter category and keep going. You’re generally not fighting people with extensive combat experience who would make sense to be difficult. Instead, you fight a morbidly obese basement dweller, a hippie protester, two 95 pound women in cocktail dresses, a 5”1 mailman, an upper-middle aged lounge singer, and so on and so on. To a man they are all much faster and much stronger than you are, because again, especially in the beginning of the game, a wet breeze would blow you over. Some of them make sense. One is a soldier who is the head of a special ops team and is wielding a big gun. His difficulty makes total sense. I have no problem with difficult enemies in games. It can be fun strategizing how to win, and make you feel super accomplished when you finally do pull it off. But there needs to be a why to explain their difficulty, or else it just comes across as lazy. The morbidly obese lunatic can run faster and is stronger than you, a trained athlete, just… because. A simple fix would have them be some kind of special infected, as opposed to people that just lost their minds. They’re faster and stronger and have thicker skin that makes them bullet sponges because of their infection. Simple.

But that’s all really secondary. The main draw of the game is crafting bonkers weapons to slaughter thousands of zombies with. That’s fun, right? I mean… yeah, generally. Like I said, the lightsaber is a great weapon. You can get a boxing glove and bowie knife to make a Freddy Krueger glove that does a lot of damage. There are guns that you can combine with giant teddy bears to make sentry turrets. That’s definitely fun. The biggest issue is that all of your weapons, like Chuck himself, are about as strong as cardboard. Yes it’s fun to put on those boxing gloves and charge headfirst into a large group of zombies, hacking and slashing and causing mass mayhem and death, but that only lasts for about ten seconds (slightly longer if you find/get the right upgrades) before the glove breaks, and you’re left with either a basic, not as fun weapon, or nothing at all. It forces you to avoid most combat situations because you don’t want to break your weapons.

How about the characters? Eh, nothing to write home about. Chuck is serviceable as a protagonist. He has a few fun moments here and there without much that makes him truly memorable. The villains behind everything don’t have an interesting motivation for kickstarting everything. It’s just money. Oh. K. The story itself starts out strong, but eventually you have to force yourself to keep going, because you’ve been doing almost nothing but fetch quest and escort missions for the past two hours. To top it all off, if you really want to get somewhat strong, you can take the easy road: restart the entire game from mission one, keeping your upgrades. By the time you’ve beaten the game, you’ll have probably done that three or four times.

Overall, is the game one of the worst ever? No, certainly not. It has its upsides, but between a story that has a hard time keeping your interest the whole way through, needlessly and illogically super difficult enemies, weak weapons that take away from the fun of creating and using them, and mid tier protagonists and antagonists, it all makes for a game that might be fun to get through once, but is pretty weak overall. You don’t lose too much if you just skip it.

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