I definitely did not expect this piece of content to be so story heavy as it was. I’m a sucker for a cute, lovable small child in a game (as creepy as that sounds) and as long as the character has decent enough voice acting, I’m happy. All of this represents the main character’s daughter, Katey. She’s infected by the zombie disease and needs Zombrex, and apparently doesn’t particularly enjoy needles. The main character, Chuck, isn’t very interesting whatsoever, though. Katey provides a sense of urgency to actually retrieving the Zombrex while Chuck is just the guy wielding the drill bucket.
The selling point in Dead Rising 2: Case 0 (and the main game) is the weapon combining system. Where you take two weapons, sometimes the combinations are obvious, sometimes they’re not, and combine them to make some sort of fierce weapon that will murder zombies like no George Romero movie’s business. The weapon combining variety throughout Case 0 is limited but once you do find a solid combination, it gives you a certain “jump for brutal joy” that you can’t get in any other game. I spent hours just searching around Still Creek for weapons to combine. I’m sure that once the full game does open up, I’m going to spend many more hours looking for items to combine. If only I could combine a machine gun and a rake…
The main fault within Dead Rising is the messed up save system. Capcom refused to change the already poor save system from the first game so the madness that occurred when you died in that one still remains. There’s no autosaves or checkpoints, and the amount of times you run into a bathroom you can save in is very limited. This ends with me frustratingly dying and having to re-do the last hour over again.
Dead Rising 2: Case Zero does exactly what it needs to, provides around 4 hours of fun and teases the full game of Dead Rising 2 to the point where I’m just dying for more Dead Rising. For the pricepoint, Dead Rising 2: Case Zero is well worth the download.
Score: 8.0
