What I'm Playing, part 16
Dead Rising 2: Off The Record
This post is entirely about Sandbox Mode. Story Mode may or may not be covered in a future post depending on if I feel like being bothered or annoyed by this game again.
So there was another publisher sale on PSN this week, this time for Capcom. As usual, I browsed the sale and looked to see if anything was a must buy for me, but as is usually the case, everything that was on sale was something I already had - except Dead Rising 2: Off The Record.
From what I had seen previously about the game, it didn't look like they had iterated much on the series (like some other franchises we know) so I figured a $10 price point was just about right since memories of the irritation from the first game still annoy me to this day. More on that in a minute.
So for this weekend's bite size gaming, I decided to give it a shot and right off the bat, I remembered why I haven't been back to this series in years.
Rehash Rehash Rehash...
Not off to a good start kids...
At the start, you are greeted with 2 options: Story Mode (nope) and Sandbox Mode (oh hell yeah!) and since I didn't feel like having every minute of my playing timed like in the first game, I went with sandbox mode. I was greeted with a little older (and fatter) Frank West jumping out of a helicopter just like he did many years ago to take on the zombie horde. And, just like many years ago, I was met with a janky camera and a character that controls like a tank and apparently doesn't run (at least not that I have figured out from experimenting with the controls. No wonder Frank got fat.) I was also met with the age old task of saving your progress yourself, which I don't have a problem with until I get careless and die and have to redo several minutes (sometimes hours) of gameplay.
Great, this shit again.
Our setting this time around is Fortune City, which if I remember correctly was the setting for Dead Rising 2 (I never did play it even though I have it. I know, I'm a bad gamer.) Once I got my bearings and was greeted with the tutorial on how challenges worked, I was off to start killing. Challenges are marked as purple stars in the environment and the handy dandy map and are, of course, rated on a scale from bronze to silver to gold. There are many Challenges to play, scattered all over the place, but they aren't all immediately available, they must be unlocked by killing enough zombies and the amount you need to kill caries from Challenge to Challenge. I think at the time of this writing, I've tried maybe 2 out of the ones that are available to me. I've been having more fun just crafting the absurd weapons and seeing how many zombies I can kill with it until it breaks. Another noticeable change in Sandbox Mode is that the survivors all are trying to kill you. The first one I came across was a shotgun and bomb toting mailman that, after trying a handful of times to kill, I eventually just left him to die at the hands of the zombies. I hope they found him tasty. There was also the psycho bride with bad makeup, a James Bond wanna be and the crazy chef in the food court full of overweight zombie women in moo moos and hair curlers.
Other things that they rehashed from the other games were the stat boosting magazines that you could carry in your inventory and those oh so annoying to find PP Stickers. It actually took me a long time to remember that I could photograph the enemies and environment for bonus experience points, I'm embarrassed to say.
Also, Capcom decides to still punish players with a poor targeting system when it comes to guns, making them pretty much useless in the game. I know, I get that the idea is to use items in the environment as weapons and craft the absurd weapons from things laying around in the shops and safe rooms, but it would be nice if players had the option to be a gun toting maniac at the end of the world if they wanted to be.
At the time of this writing I'm currently level 10 with a body count of 2,727 that has taken me about 8 or so hours to acquire, with a break for lunch in between sessions. I don't think I'll go out of my way to platinum this game, but if I ever feel the itch to just kill zombies with silly weapons, I know where I'm going to turn.
Is platinum attainable? Yes but you'll need a co-op buddy
% of trophies at the time of writing according to PSN: 11%