Dead Rising 2: Off The Record Review
What’s changed in Dead Rising 2: Off The Record since the release of the original Dead Rising 2 little more than a year ago? Very little, as it turns out. It’s more desperate cash-grab then director’s cut. The perfectly likeable Chuck Greene has been shelved as protagonist in order to make way for the return of Frank West for this “What If?” installment of the franchise. The basic Dead Rising 2 premise returns, there’s a zombie outbreak in the gambling paradise town of Fortune City, but this time we get to relive the magic as down-on-his luck former photojournalist Frank West. Having squandered his celebrity following the Willamette outbreak in the first game, this scandal-prone version of Frank becomes an overweight hard-drinking slob, before realising that an appearance on the notorious zombie-killing game show Terror Is Reality might be just what he needs to re-ignite his star.
Of course things don’t go as planned, and what follows is little more than a thin excuse to replay Dead Rising 2 with some slightly altered dialogue and cut-scenes. Instead of Chuck being framed for the outbreak, now the zombie-rights group CURE is set to take the blame. The villainous TV presenter TK is still, well, the villain, and despite some interesting cameos from previous Dead Rising characters, little else is changed. Fat Frank runs around saving survivors, defeating psychopaths, and crafting combo-weapons. The photography mechanic from the first Dead Rising returns, but the xp rewards for taking pictures are negligible, and massacring zombies with combo weapons will almost always be a better choice for levelling up than taking pictures.
The majority of the changes to Off The Record deal with faults in the game design (and thus give you the rather unpleasant feeling that they probably could have been patched in). Yes, there are a handful of new combo weapons and a new theme-park based area wittily named “The Uranus Zone,” but the most important additions are the ones that make the Dead Rising experience a little more tolerable. You are now warned when a pursuing survivor is too far away to follow you into a new area, and automatic checkpoints take place every time you enter a new area, defeat a psychopath or complete a case. This definitely helps ameliorate the blinding rage that can rise when you and a party of survivors have the misfortune to run into a psychopath who immediately goes for the defenceless aged grandma you were carrying about. Some may decry this as detracting from the overall “Dead Rising-ness” of the experience, but those lunatics can content themselves with the fact that the boss fights are still awful and the survivors are about as safety conscious as babies left alone in a bathtub.
The load times have been dramatically improved, but that doesn’t come as much consolation when you’re forced to sit through two load screens every time you want to drop a survivor off at the safehouse and then get back to exploring. Would it have been that difficult to add a designated “safe zone” in which survivors would automatically depart through the ventilation shafts into safety, rather than make you load into the safehouse and then back out again?
The addition of a sandbox mode is probably the most memorable and enjoyable new feature. This lets you run around the whole of Fortune City with no time limit. You can take as long as you want to murder zombies, kill psychopaths and track down essential items, as well as tackling a huge array of challenges designed for both single and co-op play. These vary from races to zombie-killing extravaganzas, and provide a fresh way to apply Dead Rising’s mechanics to the art of zombie slaughter. XP and money carry over from the sandbox to the story and vice-versa, making it much easier to prepare Frank West for the trials and tribulations of the various story missions. It’s the consequence-free opportunity to mess around that’s been missing since the first game.
Dead Rising 2 was a flawed game, but one that managed to skirt by a lot of its problems due its charm and the fairly unique experience it offered. There really is little else in gaming quite like Dead Rising. Unfortunately, revisiting the same space and the same story makes the very flaws you previously overlooked seem far more pronounced. Your tolerance for the terrible boss fights and repetitious level grinding may find itself severely tested once you’ve replayed the initial content somewhere in the region of 5 times just to level up. In fact for a game that’s so focused on revisiting the early sections of the game, it’s mind-boggling that the developers couldn’t figure out a way to let you skip the lengthy introduction sequence (most manage this by pressing start).
Off The Record may hold some value for those who missed the original Dead Rising 2, but it belittles the experience for people who played through the original flawed gem. Depending on how able you are to cope with a re-tread of Dead Rising 2, you may enjoy Off The Record. But frankly, after my 4th Dead Rising experience in little more than a year, I can safely say that I didn’t.
