Great fun for a budget... God I love Steam
REVIEW:
First of all let me say I was not a fan of the first game, I found it frustrating and the one save slot caused me to quit and start over more then once for a very awful experience that made me very weary of playing the second. But thanks to Steam sales I picked this game up for 14.99 and started to play.
This game is what Dead Rising one should have been…FUN. Right off the bat I was sucked in to the great story line. Then the slaying of the zombies ensued. This game does great job of taking the act of killing a zombie (an act of about 2 seconds) and makes you want to relive this act over and over and over and over and over…you get the idea. There's a great new feature that lets you combine weapons Such as a Fire ax and a sledge hammer or you can combine a wheel chair and a car battery creating a hilarious weapon where you plunge the electro-charged wheel chair into hordes of undead….good time. The game issues combo cards that let tell you the combination of weapons you can combine but you can also find a lot the variations easy enough without them.
There are a series of goals that have a sort of countdown timer associated with them these goals advance the story line of dead rising 2, but for the most part can only be activated when the case timer is almost at zero. So between major story moments the game opens up to a huge sandbox area of stores, casinos, and a couple of Las Vegas like strips. You can use this time between major story line segments to level up by killing zombies, finding weapons and crazy outfits to customize Chuck, or fighting psychopaths. Psychopaths are a type of boss battle that pits you against a non zombie opponent these battles require a little more cunning and a few have a trial and error style unless you're just radically overpowered... so let's talk about that.
This game gives you the option at any point to start the game over while retaining all of your current items and your gained experience. I want to state that this is totally optional I went through this game starting at level one and I finished at level twenty four so this option is more of a cop-out then a real feature. But hey it's nice that its there. The sequel also has three save slots instead of one, just incase your not watching your time closely enough and a case expires.
This game is fun, very fun. Killing zombies is funny and rewarding no matter how many times you do it and the story line will keep you engaged to one of the climatic endings. Do yourself a favor and grab a beer and download Dead Rising 2 on Steam. You deserve it.