Hello everyone, I am Amberdark, a new member of this community, I found out about this community only recently during my job seeking time and I applied for a reviewer job here, I haven't really gotten an answer yet and even though the answer will most likely be a negative one or none at all
(yeah I am a pessimist), I started to like this community and thought that I might start being useful around here by writing some reviews for you guys.
So as from today I will try to write as much as possible (of course will try to do so by putting quality over quantity)
Today we're looking at an interestingly mediocre game in my opinion at least, entitled "Dead Rising 2", I'll put it like this:
After you watch an anime where the action takes place in the US, there is a very big chance of you having a similar face to this
. Yes, the US looks just like the occidental media has gotten you used to, but the characters have the reactions, the personalities and the quotes of a more oriental nuance, which may provoke grimaces and Mutley-like laughters from the audience.
If "Dead Rising 2" was real, a mall would be as big as 3-4 football stadiums put together. I don't really know if this detail is a parable/satyr addressing the consumer, because I was too busy decapitating zombies with gardening tools, toys, garbage cans and improvised rocket launchers instead of looking for a more profound meaning to all of it.
It's a fact that there are a lot of zombies, and gardening tools, and toys, so many that Dead Rising 2 can be described as a superficial brawler with a joke like scenario of "how many zombies you need in order to..". One little comment - Try not to get bored of killing a ton of slow and basically dumb stuff while running through a mall for six hours and a half during the campaign.
In others words, Dead Rising 2 is for Left 4 Dead what Saint's Row is for Grand Theft Auto. It has many customization options, doesn't have high system requirements, fun consists of a more stupid and more relaxed gameplay, but loosing in other aspects like the atmosphere, story, complexity and production value. But all these things are usually a lot more superficial in parodies anyway.
Taxing it for being "something else" is like smirking while watching Robbin Hood because we don't see Kevin Costner in there.Then, it must be mentioned that Dead Rising 2 is an Asian parody. Humor does not obey the same rules/conventions you'd expect, but sometimes you will laugh more due to the non-international aspects - a post apocalyptic sport broadcast-ed as an idiotic reality show in the Battle Royale spirit or survivors that have wilder perspectives and tendencies than even the beasts themselves. Some jokes must be taken for what they are - atypical, and the drawing of parallels is redundant once you have entered into the mindless spirit or understanding of open-world "run-around".
In fact, the concept of parody is clearly of Western origin, and this deviation represents the mixture where the urban Asian culture has managed to integrate their whims into a world that is overfilled with both the American dream and nightmare in this case represented by the hot-dog and the mall.
Reaching the Zombie chapter, they come in all shapes and sizes. Retired, anorexic, and skinny zombies that we find shaking from head to toe threateningly along the shelves filled with lethal objects while stretching an optimist claw towards the picture of an ex-megastar of motorized stunts.
You are Chuck Greene. Falsely accused of the recent epidemic of the Living Dead carnivores, you are forced to prove your innocence in an investigation of the "blue pixel" type. To do so you will interact with the leader of a group called "CURE", a sort of red cross organization specially adapted for the zombie age, while striving at the same time to deliver an antibiotic called ZOMBREX to your little girl every morning for 3 long days until "the cavalry" arrives.
The cute part is that based on how many missions you accomplish successfully, and what decisions you take whenever you find this element, the story has more than one ending. The bad news is that the time cannot be re-winded, there is no autosave and sometimes the deadlines are incredibly pressing, which makes a range of cropping options with two branches (failure and success) in which it's a lot more common to just jump and run through the ocean of zombies instead of feeling the complicated algorithms which make the choices and consequences of any decent non-linear game. Sometimes however you still have an extra minute left on the clock to enjoy.
And with the time you have left you can save people lost in stores or access secondary missions. In addition to secrets, elements of platforming, bosses (psychopaths who have nothing better to do than to take up arms against their comrade, the man, in the middle of an invasion of the Living Dead, or experiments who have the soul purpose of crafting ex-centric yet very efficient weapons.
Because a baseball bat isn't nearly enough to initiate an apocalyptic scandal. A baseball bat decorated with nails will break skulls a little easier and faster. And if it still isn't enough, we have buckets with attached drills, oars with chainsaws attached at each end or martial arts gloves mixed with spikes to increase the ammount of blood being shed.
Recipes can be picked up from the level-ups, experimentation by trial and error or the help of your co-op friends. Unfortunately, this aspect is affected by the relatively small number of people who appear in the Windows Live list, and if you hope not to be looking for fellow co-op partners at 4:30AM, you should probably start playing the game together with a friend from the get-go.
Otherwise you might find yourselves in similar situations as me, to share the most deepest aspirations and literary preferences with a Russian that doesn't understand English via Google Translate, or an insomniac Danish from Faroe Islands or even a 12 year old girl from Costa Rica who skips school in order to find the last dose of ZOMBREX before the clock ticks out. All the above having issues with latency, stability, or legislation regarding underage children playing such games.
The bosses, since I mentioned them earlier are an example of path-finding and AI stupidity, fueled by sometimes exasperating tactics which force you to use everything you can get your hands on in order to have the tiniest survival chance. Melee fighting only gets interesting when you start getting additional skills, and many combos you take out on the psychopaths are either unfairly overpowered, dodged by mistake, glitched or the holy tactic of trial and error. This makes you feel like hitting a clown in the face in order to feel that vague discomfort of seeing him crying - you don't know if you acted correctly or the universe is making fun of you, at least that is how this game made me feel: confused and cold.
Another cute part is that you have a lot of crowd control methods, you can throw almost everything that is not nailed down, and the presence of vehicles, trolleys and combination of, say, a wheelchair and a car battery produces one of the most destructive devices of transporting paraplegics in the history of human kind. And the CURE organization is not protesting against the genocide of those who got infected just because and I quote "it's so damn fun to kill those bastards"
And if we forget about the games that we have just for fun, what do we have left?
Conclusion:
The Good:
- Co-op
- Open-world fun
- A throng of customization options
- Multiple endings with a good re-playability value
The Bad:
- 6 hours and a half campaign
- Co-op partners are scarce
- Fight mechanics are repetitive and tiresome in case of bosses
- Technical issues in multiplayer mode
- Most of the missions are against time
Personal rating of this game: 7.1/10
Game Info:
Title: Dead Rising 2
Producer: Capcom
Distributor: Capcom
Platform: PC
Genre: Action
Website: www.tapeitordie.com
Launch Date: 28 September 2010
System Requirements: Core 2 Duo, 2Gb Memory, 512Mb Graphics Card
Due to some problems related to the screenshot size and layout I had to upload them separately, so this is the direct link to the gallery:
SCREENY GALLERY
So as from today I will try to write as much as possible (of course will try to do so by putting quality over quantity)
Today we're looking at an interestingly mediocre game in my opinion at least, entitled "Dead Rising 2", I'll put it like this:
After you watch an anime where the action takes place in the US, there is a very big chance of you having a similar face to this
If "Dead Rising 2" was real, a mall would be as big as 3-4 football stadiums put together. I don't really know if this detail is a parable/satyr addressing the consumer, because I was too busy decapitating zombies with gardening tools, toys, garbage cans and improvised rocket launchers instead of looking for a more profound meaning to all of it.
It's a fact that there are a lot of zombies, and gardening tools, and toys, so many that Dead Rising 2 can be described as a superficial brawler with a joke like scenario of "how many zombies you need in order to..". One little comment - Try not to get bored of killing a ton of slow and basically dumb stuff while running through a mall for six hours and a half during the campaign.
In others words, Dead Rising 2 is for Left 4 Dead what Saint's Row is for Grand Theft Auto. It has many customization options, doesn't have high system requirements, fun consists of a more stupid and more relaxed gameplay, but loosing in other aspects like the atmosphere, story, complexity and production value. But all these things are usually a lot more superficial in parodies anyway.
Taxing it for being "something else" is like smirking while watching Robbin Hood because we don't see Kevin Costner in there.Then, it must be mentioned that Dead Rising 2 is an Asian parody. Humor does not obey the same rules/conventions you'd expect, but sometimes you will laugh more due to the non-international aspects - a post apocalyptic sport broadcast-ed as an idiotic reality show in the Battle Royale spirit or survivors that have wilder perspectives and tendencies than even the beasts themselves. Some jokes must be taken for what they are - atypical, and the drawing of parallels is redundant once you have entered into the mindless spirit or understanding of open-world "run-around".
In fact, the concept of parody is clearly of Western origin, and this deviation represents the mixture where the urban Asian culture has managed to integrate their whims into a world that is overfilled with both the American dream and nightmare in this case represented by the hot-dog and the mall.
Reaching the Zombie chapter, they come in all shapes and sizes. Retired, anorexic, and skinny zombies that we find shaking from head to toe threateningly along the shelves filled with lethal objects while stretching an optimist claw towards the picture of an ex-megastar of motorized stunts.
You are Chuck Greene. Falsely accused of the recent epidemic of the Living Dead carnivores, you are forced to prove your innocence in an investigation of the "blue pixel" type. To do so you will interact with the leader of a group called "CURE", a sort of red cross organization specially adapted for the zombie age, while striving at the same time to deliver an antibiotic called ZOMBREX to your little girl every morning for 3 long days until "the cavalry" arrives.
The cute part is that based on how many missions you accomplish successfully, and what decisions you take whenever you find this element, the story has more than one ending. The bad news is that the time cannot be re-winded, there is no autosave and sometimes the deadlines are incredibly pressing, which makes a range of cropping options with two branches (failure and success) in which it's a lot more common to just jump and run through the ocean of zombies instead of feeling the complicated algorithms which make the choices and consequences of any decent non-linear game. Sometimes however you still have an extra minute left on the clock to enjoy.
And with the time you have left you can save people lost in stores or access secondary missions. In addition to secrets, elements of platforming, bosses (psychopaths who have nothing better to do than to take up arms against their comrade, the man, in the middle of an invasion of the Living Dead, or experiments who have the soul purpose of crafting ex-centric yet very efficient weapons.
Because a baseball bat isn't nearly enough to initiate an apocalyptic scandal. A baseball bat decorated with nails will break skulls a little easier and faster. And if it still isn't enough, we have buckets with attached drills, oars with chainsaws attached at each end or martial arts gloves mixed with spikes to increase the ammount of blood being shed.
Recipes can be picked up from the level-ups, experimentation by trial and error or the help of your co-op friends. Unfortunately, this aspect is affected by the relatively small number of people who appear in the Windows Live list, and if you hope not to be looking for fellow co-op partners at 4:30AM, you should probably start playing the game together with a friend from the get-go.
Otherwise you might find yourselves in similar situations as me, to share the most deepest aspirations and literary preferences with a Russian that doesn't understand English via Google Translate, or an insomniac Danish from Faroe Islands or even a 12 year old girl from Costa Rica who skips school in order to find the last dose of ZOMBREX before the clock ticks out. All the above having issues with latency, stability, or legislation regarding underage children playing such games.
The bosses, since I mentioned them earlier are an example of path-finding and AI stupidity, fueled by sometimes exasperating tactics which force you to use everything you can get your hands on in order to have the tiniest survival chance. Melee fighting only gets interesting when you start getting additional skills, and many combos you take out on the psychopaths are either unfairly overpowered, dodged by mistake, glitched or the holy tactic of trial and error. This makes you feel like hitting a clown in the face in order to feel that vague discomfort of seeing him crying - you don't know if you acted correctly or the universe is making fun of you, at least that is how this game made me feel: confused and cold.
Another cute part is that you have a lot of crowd control methods, you can throw almost everything that is not nailed down, and the presence of vehicles, trolleys and combination of, say, a wheelchair and a car battery produces one of the most destructive devices of transporting paraplegics in the history of human kind. And the CURE organization is not protesting against the genocide of those who got infected just because and I quote "it's so damn fun to kill those bastards"
And if we forget about the games that we have just for fun, what do we have left?
Conclusion:
The Good:
- Co-op
- Open-world fun
- A throng of customization options
- Multiple endings with a good re-playability value
The Bad:
- 6 hours and a half campaign
- Co-op partners are scarce
- Fight mechanics are repetitive and tiresome in case of bosses
- Technical issues in multiplayer mode
- Most of the missions are against time
Personal rating of this game: 7.1/10
Game Info:
Title: Dead Rising 2
Producer: Capcom
Distributor: Capcom
Platform: PC
Genre: Action
Website: www.tapeitordie.com
Launch Date: 28 September 2010
System Requirements: Core 2 Duo, 2Gb Memory, 512Mb Graphics Card
Due to some problems related to the screenshot size and layout I had to upload them separately, so this is the direct link to the gallery:
SCREENY GALLERY
