No two snowflakes are alike
When Capcom announced that they planned to put co-op into all of their major releases Co-Optimus wept with joy. The likes of Resident Evil 5 and Lost Planet 2 were brilliant, but flawed games. My recent battles with Dead Rising 2 continue this trend: should it be rebranded Dead Frustrating 2?
Picture the scene – two men, stood side by side, facing off against a numberless hoard of undead fiends. Now picture it with one man wearing a flowery summer dress and the other an outfit that would not be out off place on the cover of ‘S&M Weekly’. The less said about the ‘massager’ that he is using as a weapon, the better. Dead Rising 2 is great fun. It has a silly sense of humor that means it has more in common with Saints Row 2, than other undead combat games such as Left 4 Dead 2. With an open hub design that features a snapshot of the Vegas like Fortune City, the number of possibilities in the game seems endless.
Before I say anything else about Dead Rising 2 I want to admit that I did not get on with the first game. Frank West was a great character and the idea of killing zombies in a mall was brilliant, but the frustrating save system and strange time management meant that I died continuously and became confused easily. Surely the sequel would fix these issues and with added co-op become an instant classic? Our 4.5 out of 5 review suggested so.
However, over the past 4 weeks I have been playing the game with a co-op pal and for every moment of joy there is a moment of pain. On the positive, the concept behind the game is still a brilliant one. Adding an additional player to the game also works as now both of you can run around in your pants, or ride a pink bicycle into a hoard of the undead. As a series of inane and fun moments the game is a fantastic sandbox. Graphically the game impresses with a detailed world that covers malls, casinos and Fortune City’s very own strip. Enemies are almost limitless and Capcom should be praised for making a game that can be played in co-op and have so many zombies on the screen at the same time, with the minimum of slowdown.
Like many things in life, good things come at a cost; the maggot to Dead Rising 2’s delicious Royal Gala apple is the loading times. The large levels and hundreds of enemies can take up to 60 seconds to load, and as on occasion you move from screen to screen quite quickly you can spend more time watching the game load than actually playing. At first I thought my copy was faulty and the 360 was crashing, nope, just the game loading and saving. Speaking of saving, for a game that is designed with co-op in mind there is an almost unforgivable bug – every time the host player saves, the second player is kicked. Not too bad if you can invite them back in promptly, but as mentioned the loading times are very long. This means you have to weigh up how often you save alongside kicking your partner. In my opinion, this is a serious design flaw.
When playing Dead Rising 2 you will see a lot of loading screen - get used to them
If the loading and saving was not frustrating enough, I still cannot get my head around the mission structure. Set over a series of days the game has an in-game clock that you must adhere to if you are to beat the game. This may mean saving someone at 10am, or being somewhere at 2pm. The problem is that I get confused if the time limit denotes the start of a mission or the end. This meant that on more than one occasion I would arrive 2 in-game hours early, or arrive far too late to actually have time to complete a task. Why are Capcom being so obtuse with a simple mission structure?
The real reason I get so passionate about the flaws in Dead Rising 2 is not because the game is so bad, but because it should be so good. The graphics, the hub world, the copious amount of weapons to use, the outfits to try on, the comedy segments, the almost bug free gameplay, the solid co-op connection – all of these elements are very strong and work well. If I were given a free reign to run around the world Crackdown style I could entertain myself and a pal for hours.
However, there is no way of ignoring the undead elephant in the room; the game has some very poor game design choices. The problem of kicking your partner when you save underlines the issue the game has with saving. There are far more places to save than in the first game, but you still have to decide too often to back track to save, or risk dying on a boss and having to repeat hours of gameplay. If the game did not kick your co-op partner, at least you could save safe in the knowledge that you would not have to repeatedly invite them in. Sometimes, a game can be a ‘co-op classic’ or a ‘co-op ruined’ on the basis of just one element, as is the case here. The barrier between the host and player two is not insurmountable, but it is a giant pain in the backside. A big enough issue that once I have fully completed Overtime mode, I don't plan to pick up the game again for a long time.