Review by: Tom Chick

One of the best things you can say about Dead Rising 2 is that it really gets Dead Rising 1. This is no small feat. Dead Rising 1 wasn’t easy to get. Oh, sure, it put a hundred zombies onscreen at once. Who wouldn’t get the appeal of that? But otherwise, it was full of weird design choices about saved games, boss fights, humor, combat, leveling up, escort missions, and storytelling. It seemed like a game made to bewilder ten people for every one person who loved it. The end result was a successful enough game – I mean, here I am writing about its sequel – but also arguably a “cult hit”. That's not a term a publisher really wants applied to its games.

So the easiest thing in the world would be to streamline out that other stuff, focus on the bit about the hundred zombies onscreen, and ride the wave of zombie popularity with a friendly brainless action game called Dead Rising 2. That's what we one in ten feared when Capcom announced the sequel had been farmed out to a little known studio in Vancouver. A studio that had previously made baseball games for the most part.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the quick n’ dirty cash-in sequel. Capcom and developer Blue Castle managed to preserve and in most cases improve all of the idiosyncrasies that made Dead Rising a cult hit. Dead Rising 2 is every bit as good as Dead Rising 1, and for mostly the exact same reasons, but improved.

Dead Rising 2 isn't something you play through once and finish. It's an open world game with a time limit. You're in a modest approximation of Vegas during a zombie outbreak that lasts for three days. In that time, you'll be given goals faster than you can accomplish them. Every one of them is optional. You might fail some of them. That's okay. It's even expected. You can even flub the entire storyline. Just get as much done as you can, leveling up your character in the process and learning more increasingly outrageous and increasingly effective ways to kill zombies. The idea is that you'll keep all your progress so you can do better next time.

First and foremost, this is a joyous orgy of graphic zombie killing. But the framework is a smart re-playable resource management game where time is your greater enemy. For the most part, zombies are a nuisance. You won't mind the damage you take when a zombie mauls you so much as you'll mind being held up while he grapples you because, dammit, you're trying to get somewhere. It's like The Sims, but instead of having to pee, you have to split open the head of a dozen shambling bloodthirsty ghouls.