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.