Dead Rising 2: Case Zero Review

A unique experiment in gaming and one of the best experiences on the Arcade. Roll on September 24th.

360 launch game Dead Rising was a groundbreaking technical demonstration of what Microsoft's new console could do. While it wasn't without its flaws, Dead Rising was fun, furious and one of the most replayable games of all time, offering an open-ended narrative combined with sandbox gameplay.

With the long-awaited continuation just a few short weeks away, Capcom have released sequel/prequel Case Zero via the Arcade. Acting as a precursor to the main game, it has the unenviable challenge of providing a reintroduction, a tutorial to the new features, a teaser for the game proper and a whole unique bite size Dead Rising experience. The ease with which it hits these targets is astounding.

Chuck Green is a motorbike stuntman fleeing the Las Vegas zombie outbreak with his infected daughter Katey. While stopping off in the remote desert town of Still Creek to refuel and give Katey her twelve-hourly injection of bite stabiliser Zombrex, Chuck is carjacked and loses his supply of medicine. Now Chuck has twelve hours to find his daughter another shot of Zombrex, while attempting to rebuild an old motorbike and escape Still Creek before the military comes marching through. The clock is ticking.

All the classic Dead Rising features are on offer here - incredible violence, a sandbox environment, a story that unfolds as and when you want it to, survivors to rescue and multitudes of weapons with which to give the walking dead a good whack. What is a genuine surprise is how much all of those old features have been refined. The tight time limit has been stripped back to the bare basics - a frantic search for five missing bike parts - and the survivor AI has been given a merciful kick up the arse. Barehanded survivors no longer go on suicide runs into swarms of zombies and the pathfinding - a major bugbear of the previous game - has been sorted out so the rescued humans don't get stuck on the scenery. It bodes well for the retail release.

The visuals have also undergone something of an upgrade and now look like a proper current-gen game. While the original was more interested in filling an area with hundreds of zombies, Case Zero proves that both the mass of walking corpses and proper lush visuals are within easy reach. This step up in graphics also applies to the gore content, which is far less cartoonish than before and feels endlessly more violent.