Dead Rising 2 is what happens when someone spends four years thinking about how to make Dead Rising better. The game’s time limit was oppressive, but also motivational in how it forced players to think about efficiency and organization. A mall loaded with toys and make-shift weapons was a playground of engagement, but faltered when it came to practical applications. Rescuing survivors was a refreshing gameplay loop, but it became undone through unreliable control, absurd load times, and terrible communication. For all of Dead Rising’s strengths—sales numbers a legions of fans prove it had many—virtually every measurable category would have “Needs Improvement” listed on its report card.
Blue Castle Games (now known as Capcom Vancouver) did their homework. Not only did every unsustainable facet of Dead Rising receive attention, a majority of its supporting systems were completely remolded. Most importantly, Blue Castle Games accomplished all of this without throwing away the pieces that made Dead Rising great. There was still a bonkers story, a call to rescue survivors, an insane playground of violence, and the looming threat of a scheduled doomsday. The only difference was the consistency and strength in which it was all applied.
Former stuntman Chuck Greene replaced Frank West as the game’s protagonist. Chuck was basically a blank canvass upon which the game imprints the Upset Man archetype with one notable exemption; Frank’s self-interest was replaced by a Chuck’s need to care for his ailing daughter, Katey. She requires Zombrex, a sort of miracle drug that wards off her zombie bite infection, every 24 hours. Chuck must grapple with maintaining her supply of Zombrex while simultaneously hoarding survivors in a safe house and solving the mystery of the latest zombie outbreak.
Fortune City, Dead Rising 2’s setting, was projected as a replacement for a destroyed Las Vegas. An entire city had a better ring to it than Willamette’s otherwise pedestrian shopping mall. In practice, however, Fortune City functioned identically to Willamette ode to suburban commerce. It was a rousing collecting of mall-like areas, casinos, and construction-in-progress set pieces that surrounded a huge, menacing courtyard. It wasn’t a city, but it also didn’t have to be. Fortune City took the insane potential of the stores that defined Dead Rising, augmented them with the wildcard of casinos, and boosted their presence with a central hub filled with different points of interest.
Photography was Dead Rising 2’s only notable sacrifice. Snapping pictures of zombies and people in amusing positions, as extraneous as it seemed, fell in line with Dead Rising’s narrative and progression systems. In its place, however, was the ability to find and combine weapons at a workbench, a latent objective much more in tune with Dead Rising 2’s insistence on combat. Chuck still earned Prestige Points (PP) that could fill out a scorecard of stats and grant him professional wrestling moves and other abilities, but now he could earn them by combining objects together and using them to humiliate or beat the living shit out of the undead.
Dead Rising 2 neatly facilitated item and weapon combination. Maintenance rooms scattered across Fortune City provided workbenches to combine items, and inside of each one were two objects that could be duct taped or welded together. Only certain items were able to be combined, a process learned through random experimentation or by collecting combo cards over the course of the game. Combo cards, either found in Fortune City or earned from survivors, not only clued the player in on new combinations, but also granted a unique move for Chuck if you had the card for that particular combination.
The best parts of Dead Rising 2 come with forging and testing out weapon combinations. You could make an I.E.D. by combining a box of nails with a propane tank, or, my personal favorite, the Defiler by strapping a sledge hammer to a fireman’s axe. Dead Rising 2 was also quick to embrace how utterly stupid combinations could be, allowing the player to create a helmet that projected gas-powered spinning blades of death by combing a Servebot mask with a lawn mower. Some of these combos were more ridiculous and entertaining than then were practical and effective, but my god the folks at Blue Castle came up with stacks of wacky ideas. Weapon combos may ultimately have more limitations and photography, but they were far more in sync with Dead Rising’s stated objectives; photojournalism wouldn’t help kill things faster.
Beyond that, the remainder Dead Rising 2 follows the path of its predecessor. Chuck works on case files while paying close attention to his Katey’s health, both of which are closely tied into scouring Fortune City for survivors and defeating psychopaths. Terse roguelike elements remain, namely the player’s ability to start the game over at any time with Chuck’s character level completely intact. Information and feedback better organized and communicated this time around, in part from a save system that auto-saves after major events and doesn’t tuck bathrooms (manual save points) in out-of-the-way locations.
Through all of its improvements, Dead Rising 2 remained an untraditional and unnaturally hard game. Open worlds are generally thought of a bastions of free exploration and vacant pacing. From an impatient or uninformed point of view, Dead Rising 2’s penchant for delaying access to convenient shortcuts and, if a survivor dies, essentially locking away content was antithetical to a conventional open-world experience. You’re meant to thrive on the tension of a timer and/or repeat the game again and again in pursuit of an efficient performance. This will not click with some people and that’s totally OK; Dead Rising 2 was trying to be more accessible, but it still wasn’t meant to be a game for everyone under the sun.
Like the very recent reissue of its predecessor, Dead Rising 2’s appearance on the current generation of hardware is about as formal as they come. 1080p/60fps is the bare minimum for previous-generation remasters, and Dead Rising 2—a game that frequently brought the frame-rate to its knees on Xbox 360—looks great on Xbox One. Nothing else has changed, which, depending on your point of view, is either Capcom trying to make a quick buck by releasing the same game over again or a $20 re-up to experience a modern version of a classic game on a console you currently have plugged in to your television.
Notable in their absence from this package are Case Zero and Case West. The former was one of the best values of all time when it was released at $5 a few weeks before Dead Rising 2 came out. Case Zero had its own unique environment, a functional prequel storyline, and even the ability to get Chuck up to level 5 and carry it over to the main game. Case West was a Dead Rising 2 postscript that featured Frank West, also featuring its own unique area and serving as a bizarre epilogue to Dead Rising 2. While tied to Dead Rising 2, both Case West and Case Zero were standalone pieces of content, which somewhat excuses their absence.
I adored Dead Rising 2 when it came out in 2010 (demonstrated in this poorly written review posted six years ago). The sequel’s surprising performance stood in line with Mass Effect 2 and Assassin’s Creed 2 as games that got it right after a messy debut. Everything before was practice and everything after was iteration. In Dead Rising 2’s case, it was and still is the most concise and best practiced version of a zombie apocalypse in which altruistic tendencies and hysterical weaponry combine forces to kill psychopaths and rescue those in need. Frank West was the hero we deserved, but Chuck Greene was the one we wanted all along.
