Nothing fancy. Almost insultingly simple and mediocre. Hardly worthy of hype at all, much less what it receives.
Let's start off with saying that there are two types of zombie games out there. There are the dark, gritty, lonely sort. That would be your old school Resident Evil sort. You're stuck in a situation, surrounded by the walking dead, essentially screwed for supplies. You make due with what you find around you, and you survive it out; that's why it's called "survival-horror," after all.
Then you have your OTHER type of zombie game. The type that sets you out in the field with thousands of zombies descending upon your delicious little body. Fortunately for you, you average, ordinary citizen, you are equipped with every sort of heavy ordinance and violent abomination of a weaponry that could be fathomed, and you use said weapons to hack, slash, shoot, and chainsaw your way through countless rotting delinquents that you encounter, as you can manage, ripping through flesh as if it were butter. That'd be your Left 4 Dead, and invariably, your Dead Rising.
I was hopeful that Dead Rising 2 wouldn't take that route; however, I shouldn't have set Capcom to such a high bar of expectation. Let's sum up Dead Rising 2: you play Chuck Greene, prototypical tough, single dad, who lost his love in a previous zombie outbreak. Armageddon has been overcome, and now the world has reset itself to the land of debauchery and sin as it once was; now, Greene is performing on some ridiculous gameshow, "Terror Is Reality," whereupon the players get out their zombie-rage and slaughter "pet" zombies... with CHAINSAWS ON MOTORCYCLES, in the true American spirit of things. Then, lo and behold, someone screws the pooch and sets all those zombies out - WOE IS ME, we have another outbreak on our hands.
The plot is essentially the worst D-level screenplay out of a bad zombie movie that was never made, obviously not made for very good reasons. Nobody speaks with any sense, realism, or sense of realism; everyone somehow manages to take everything that happens in stride (woops, well this all happened before! guess we gotta clean up a lot of blood and guts again). There's also this things about activists fighting for zombie's rights? They're played off to be completely insane in their beliefs, yet they're also supposed to be seen as the correct stance to have? Your guess is as good as mine there.
While the plot and characters - especially your daughter, Katy! - have plopped their head once too many times on the curb, and might as well have died and re-risen like all the walking corpses, the gameplay also has itself has little to boast about. You have your basic hack-'n-slasher, where you're free to button mash until all surrounding undead have been bluntly put to the ground. It's a nice feeling to be able to rack up such a high bodycount, which is half the fun in most zombie tales. You're free to pick up just about any object you find lying around to swing as a weapon, and there's a customization feature that allows you to combine fairly arbitrary items into fairly arbitrary hybrid weapons (i.e. nail-bat, buzzsaw, molotov cocktail, sledgehammer-axe-thing), an action in itself that is pretty novel, although it loses all sense of integrity when you're expected to perform this weapon-building on an extremely constant basis, as it's one of the few ways allotted to level up.
Fighting is hardly a challenge, as a zombie can generally be taken down in a few swings, less with one of the aforementioned customed weapons. You can get overwhelmed now and then by the sheer number of zombies, but as long as you can down a cup of coffee or some orange juice, you may as well be the Incredible Hulk. The missions of the game play out over a 72-hour timeframe, in which you're free to roam around and do whatever you want sandbox-style, so long as you meet certain story objectives at specified times. There are oodles of side-quests in the zombie-infested world, along with more escort quests with old ladies who are just begging to get devoured than you'll ever want to complete. Any enemy still living amongst the undead will be vastly overpowered and much more difficult to kill, not to mention while you're still surrounded my numerous badies (don't get me started about the bit involving a live tiger). But most of your missions are either overtly sarcastic and intended for humour/time-killing's sake, or they're a story-mission, meaning they're so poorly written and over-acted that you'd probably prefer letting the zombies chew you up. And not to be a gripe, but whatever happened to autosave? I realize its invention has made the concept of manual saving almost mythical, but when it's quite easy to be killed by the infinite hordes of the undead, I haven't snacked on a hotdog found lying in a bloodridden corner of a casino in awhile, and people begin shooting machine guns at me... I sincerely like a quick autosave before continuing with a massive quest (especially when I didn't realize said mission was so critical before embarking on it). But that's one small gripe from me... among many larger ones.
The intriguing feature Dead Rising 2 offers is the co-op play. You're free to pair up with a friend for split-screen fun, or you can access the PSN for random play with a stranger. The joy of combating the living dead with a friend gives the entire game a whole new sense of camaraderie, and the mutual bodycount can be a huge thrill, especially when one of you falls behind, and you begin fending for their life. But this small brightside is hardly enough to make up for the absolutely appallingly bad storyline and abysmally boring gameplay that you can get in any Devil May Cry game.
To put it simply, if you were seeking realism, a fright or two, or some proper, dark, devilish zombie-survival action, you've come to the wrong stripmall. Instead, be prepared to hack-'n-slash your way through never-ending hordes of paper-thin zombies, and live through hour upon excruciating hour of horrible acting and bad storytelling. Oh, and of course, you can dress up in womens clothes and put masks of Blanca and other Capcom characters on unsuspecting zombies. Though, maybe that went without saying... This is Capcom, after all.