Chainsawing through a parade of zombies is always going to be fun, but Dead Rising 2 is far more interested in fashion than gore. You can dress your man in almost anything: a tuxedo, a football uniform, a mini-skirt. There are dozens of weapons, but since killing zombies is easy, even the most brutal killing machine feels more like a fashion accessory. (What will go best with your tuxedo: a battle-axe, a shotgun, or a wooden baseball bat with nails poking out of one end?) Dead Rising 2 is probably the least scary zombie videogame ever made, but if you squint a little bit, it looks like a Paul Verhoeven-esque deep-cover satire of American consumerism. With chainsaws.
Not much has changed from the first Dead Rising. The gameplay is still a mishmash of GTA-style free-range and narrative-based missions, with a fantastically annoying ticking clock that forces you to rush everywhere. (Only Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask managed to make the ticking clock work. Actually, now that I think about it, even that was incredibly annoying. On another note, am I the only person who liked Majora’s Mask?) The cut-scenes are uniformly awful and punishingly frequent. The voice-acting is pitched somewhere between “Robot Answering Machine” and “Dubbed German Soap Opera.”
But Dead Rising 2 is also caustically funny. You’re trapped inside of a mall-casino complex where pretty much everything can be a weapon. And who can resist the subtle charm of picking up a giant pink teddy bear and throwing it into a mass of zombies? Or of taping a machete to a toy helicopter 
to create a Flying Zombie Decapitation machine? Or matching bowie knives with boxing gloves (see right)? All button-mashers should be this stylishly twisted. Unfortunately, just when you’re finding a fun groove, the main storyline will beckon – sick daughter, mysterious conspiracy, blah blah blah. Dead Rising 2 makes for a great gore-splattered mallrat comedy. But when it comes to Zombie Apocalypse action games, Resident Evil 2 is The Godfather, Left 4 Dead 2 is Goodfellas, and Dead Rising 2 is Mickey Blue Eyes. B-
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1st one was fun, this looks like more fun but still has a crappy save system and it gets issues when too many zombies are on the screen simultaneously. Wait for a price drop IMO.
Nice to meet u
I picked this up yesterday, since I was such a fan of the first one. It’s largely the same game, which isn’t a bad thing, with a few added bits and pieces. The combo weapon system is a blast thus far, and they’ve given you three save slots instead of one, along with more save locations throughout the map, so it’s a bit less annoying there. The most entertaining way to approach the first one was to spend a play-through just screwing around, figuring stuff out and leveling up, hacking stuff to pieces, etc. Since you can carry over your achievements and abilities through to each play through, it makes subsequent runs much more entertaining. I have a feeling DR2 is going to be much the same.
I don’t think I want to play any game that can make Electric Playground’s Miri drop her perpetual Intrepid Reporter Smile. I saw her interviewing one of the DR2 leads, and he was getting really excited explaining the new zombie-killing methods, especially the rotating super-pitchfork, and she actually dropped her smile and said, “you are a sick man and you have problems” and passed the mic back to him for comment. It was disturbingly hilarious – NOTHING makes Miri stop being perky….except. Scary!
Its just fun to come up with weapons to annihilate the undead. This game is far from scary. Was never meant to be scary. Its was made to kill many zombies many different ways but interrupted with missions. The replay is great as well
I’m still gonna get it when I have the money.
i love thes game