Managed to play some. This game owns, just like the first.
The game is 1000 x easier than the original Dead Rising too, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, the games are so undeniably similar but there are some differences that make DR2 feel like a totally different, fresher experience.
Things like the survivors being manageable on a first run. In DR1, you had to protect them like cattle, in order to ensure survival you had to aim at specific places they should run for and then support them in the tail. In DR2, zombies don't go for survivors, they go for Chuck and survivors are faster than Chuck as well. So this puts the pressure on you surviving rather than the survivors.
And the survivors are so useful in DR2 that I have these guys as my rag tag group of ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE badasses. I take them on main story case files, and they help me out. I have been averaging 4 or more survivors at once. The last batch I helped out was a group of 6 people, one of which I was carrying. I couldn't do that in DR1 until my second playthrough.
The game environment is much bigger too and this is the crux of the differences in DR1 and 2. DR1 feels tighter. Objectives are closer together and you have to pick and choose what you want to do, and with so many things offered, it gave the game an unparalleled sense of tension at times. By contrast, DR2 is much more open-ended, the environment is so big that it took me at least 20 minutes to get from one end to the next. There weren't a lot of missions offered and I managed to save all the survivors offered (except one poor Stuart who succumbed to looters, I knew I should have just ran!) but with my main story case file timer beeping red. Suffice to say, I was sweating.
This game is tense, when it wants to be. I'm half convinced I should start a new game on a new file (keeping one save per file for old times sake) just to explore because Fortune City is monstrous.
PS: the fact that every purse has a dildo in it is hilarious. There's nothing more hilarious than killing a boss with a dildo.
PSS: whoever complains about the framerate in this game is a fucking wah wah. I'm not seeing much of a difference between DR1 and DR2 in terms of performance and I'm playing on a ps3.
