[HowardC]

Sorry Boogie, but dead Rising 2 is NOT a 4 pickle game. Not by even fans of the game's standards. It's a 2.5-3 pickle if that. The game still has the same frustrating flaws the first game had and very little has been fixed.

Major flaws that make the game basically unplayable.

1. The timer system. It's just dumb. Sure it might make things more realistic, but all it really does is make you play the same game several times. When you are finally ready to just mess around, the timer fouls up your fun yet again as you never have a free-roaming as an option... you'll be interrupted when the time runs out.

2. Broken map. The mall can be confusing to navigate and you can't set point markers everywhere, just on indiviual missions. What's unacceptable though is that once you rescuse a survivor, the arrow doesn't point towards the safe house. So you have to hope that there is a safe house based mission for that day or that you remember the way.

3. Unfair and unnecessarily hard boss fights. All bosses are humans without any special powers, body armor, ect. I can kill a zombie, who's a frikkin undead super human, with two shotgun blasts. I can't kill a human boss with 4 rounds of fire from a machine gun! Hell without giving too much away there's one boss who can jump over bathroom stalls with a single bound! If you want the boss fights to be hard make the bosses smart, NOT indestructable and super-human.

4. Boring gameplay. There are maybe 4 types of zombies in the game. They all can be killed and attack your roughly the same way. In turn there are only 4 or 5 different death animations for each zombie. So no matter how cool mounting chainsaw to a motorcycle sounds, it gets real old killing zombies. Also they are more of a living obstacle in the game as well, with the REAL gameplay involving fetch missions (people or stuff) or boss fights.

The story is pretty good. It's obvious what is going to happen about 30 minutes in but it's still good enough that you'll want to finish it once. Of course to finish the game you have to play the damn thing over and over to build yourself up enough so like DR1, few people will ever get that far. I'll be honest, I beat it with a trainer... no way I was going to put myself though that torture.