Time limits try to stop me gambling, other than that good.

ded 2

Firstly the few problems I noticed with this port/version – audio level of dialogues during cutscenes was way too quiet(almost ruined a lot of the important moments); I had to go trough a lot of trouble to get my NOT xbox controller to work with this game(having to download and calibrate x360ce – controller emulator) since there's no support for other controllers and from what I've heard even Xbox controllers have trouble with this port/version. Trying to make it work also somehow made the game crash in a way that made me restart my pc a couple times, but after the initial setup the game didn't crash again and I didn't experience any problems with performance either.

About the game itself: It's a step up from the first one probably in every way – the overall story is better, it looks slightly better, it has more stuff... But this probably doesn't say anything, especially for someone who hasn't played the first game. To put it very simply – it's a wacky zombie kinda-survival-kinda-sandbox game. Both this and first game have interesting story structure("cases") and I personally really liked the main story of this one, besides a certain moment near the end that ruined it for me. I was planning on playing way more of this game, but after it... Yeah, that moment ruined the whole game for me. I'm just weirdly sensitive about certain things, so maybe when you'll reach that point in the story and it'll happen you won't even care. Anyways, even with that "thing" that happened I would still say that the story is decent and interesting.


Gameplay. You walk/run at snail's-pace(that's not an exaggeration, the MC moves unnaturally slowly. Imagine if you were jogging besides your friend who for some reason decided to walk super slowly and you tried your best to keep pace with him, without outrunning him. That's how mc moves – it's a jogging animation, but if it was in the specific situation I just described. There's a zombie apocalypse, Chuck, why are you SO LAID BACK!!?? And even when I maxed out my speed it was barely any faster, that "max" speed should've been the default and you should've only got faster from there. ) As I was saying(before I got sidetracked), you traverse trough the map that is divided into a few major zones using the speed of a senile turtle and almost anything you find along your way to fight off zombies, save survivors, escort those survivors back to the safehouse and defeat human bosses along the way. You can even pick up stuff like benches or trash bins and swing them around as weapons, besides the more convenient weapons like fire axes, sledgehammers, pistols, shotguns, snipers, teddy bears and so on(basically there's a huge variety of possible weapons, differing greatly in usefulness and damage) all of this already existsed in the first game(it's part of dead rising's identity), but there is a new addition of being able to combine weapons to create something unique crazy and often really fun. These "combo weapons" can be made only in special rooms that are scattered throughout the map and only after you get a "combo card"/blueprint of that new weapon(those blueprints you can get from certain boss fights, also possibly from leveling up and from certain posters. Maybe there's some other ways too, but those were all that I found) I didn't experience this mechanic fully because I was planning on that after I was done with the story +all the combo cards I had gotten up until the end of the story asked for items I couldn't find or forgot where to find, but the ones I got to try out were all cool and awesome, so they were definitely a great addition. Overall the combat is better than the first game, but not by much and I still wouldn't call it good. Fighting zombies you probably won't even notice how bad it is(probably because on zombies it works quite well and against them it's fun), but you'll definitely realise it when fighting bosses. These games have human bosses "psychopaths", they're the most crazy unhinged characters I've ever seen and I understand why people like them so much. The presentation and the craziness of them is a very unique quality and it often is reinforced by their gimmick and that is super cool, but unfortunately there's not a single good boss fight in the game(at least of those I've experienced, I'm sure I missed a couple or more) Those are definitely very entertaining characters, but it's a pain to fight any and all of them. First of all – most of them are much faster than you, which means that if a fat guy with a chainsaw charges after the athletic MC, mc has no chance to outrun that charge and I'm not even sure how you're supposed to avoid majority of their attacks. They also have a ton of health, deal a lot of damage, oftentimes the nearest safe point is far away so you have to run back trough hordes of zombies to most likely die again against some attack you have no idea how to dodge... All of these bosses are very unfun to fight and I could only search for a way to cheese them or somehow trick their ai – ANYTHING, that's how terrible they were to fight. Maybe at the end their craziness makes it worth to defeat them and possibly see a cutscene of their fate, but they are just the most unfun bosses to fight I've seen probably ever. These bosses are difficult, but not in a good fair way, this game is too very difficult and I kinda wished that it had difficulty options. I heard some people say to just ignore the story and get strong by saving survivors, killing zombies, leveling up(the main story, levels, progress, the sandbox and time works really strangely in this game, i would recommend learning about it beforehand from someone who is better at explaining than me), but I always want to experience the story first and the timer is needlessly stressful and doesn't allow me to approach the game how I want to and that really sucks the fun out of it – that, boss fights, difficulty only ramping up(with zombies getting more aggressive, starting to use more grab attacks – I hate those, they felt like a waste of time and super difficult to avoid, and later on in the story the zombies become even more aggressive and with even worse grab attacks)... For me that really ruins what I feel dead rising should be. Maybe it wouldn't make sense stroy-wise, but from the first time I've seen dead rising it was a super fun, crazy zombie sandbox... Now that I've played the first two games I know that it's much more restricting than what I imagined. It's still a good game, but for me at least, it feels needlessly difficult. If I want a difficult zombie survival game I can always play resident evil, dead rising should be about having fun instead(unfortunately a lot of design choices contradict that.) There's few other things I wanted to mention – the music is great(good range of tracks – from intense boss fight music with lyrics to calm, almost-nostalgic tunes), the cutscenes are better than in the first game, but they still feel kinda old. I don't mind it too much, but it can sometimes feel jarring how cutscenes look worse than regular gameplay graphics(regular gameplay graphics and style I really like, but the cutscenes look different from that and I'm not sure it's in a good way), they're still good if judging by what happens in them and stuff like camera angles, direction of movement and all that important stuff though.
Overall, I would still recommend it to people who like zombie games and want a crazy, wacky one, especially if you played and liked dead rising 1. It's just a really good sequel and a fun zombie game.