The Dead Rising franchise gained its inception and inspiration from the 1978 Version of Dawn of the Dead and fulfills the fantasy of everyone who saw that movie and wanted to live in such in a environment. Sniping Zombies, stabbing Zombies, running zombies over, hitting zombies with pies, shooting them with water while enjoying a mall’s stock of food and clothes were just a handful of the concepts the film introduced, but the Capcom Franchise has poured a boatload more of sand into this box making the experience even more pleasurable for those who love to kill Zombies. If a gamer has neither an appreciation for the source material, the love of slaying the undead, or just playing around in such an environment then they should probably play Halo or any of the other seven dozen games that play just like it.

Is Dead Rising 2 perfect? No, its mechanics are extremely clunky with questionable hit boxes, and frustrating boss fights that require zero strategy other than exploiting a glitch and spamming your health items. "Rising 2's" regular story line ends with a fight against the obviously hidden villain who stands at the top of a scaffolding shooting down at you with seemingly impossible fury that is until you find a sweet spot at the edge of the scaffolding just below him and can blast away with your own firearms in a place where he can seldom hit you as his health drains away. The same problem can be said about the vicious Vana White twins that assault Chuck with lightning fast razor swords from every side. Seem impossible? The sequence can be challenging until you realize that killing one twin means you win the battle then you just drinking that OJ and empty your shotgun at only one twin. Problem solved.

People who play this game and love it don't play it to fight long and fulfilling battles. Fans play it because they enjoy the sound of a zombie going pop, crunch, and splat in an amusing fashion. Fighting the poorly designed boss fights is just a necessity to overcome to massacre more rotting bodies. Get it?

Most of you that hate this game probably won't, but to call it frustrating because you have to restart to finish it is an unfair analysis especially with Rising 2 that has smoothed out many of the more tedious problems of the original. Remember trying to fight three convicts on a hummer with a mounted machine gun with only four squares of health in Rising 1? Part 2 has nothing that compares near the front end of the game and I had no problem marching through the game without a restart. Some readers criticize the save system, but Rising 2 offers THREE slots over the original’s frustrating one. Not to mention the fact that there are bathrooms just about everywhere and always in places before big fights. Even the survivors in Rising 2 are a huge improvement: resilient, battle ready, and making the original's hapless followers look like you were trying to escort Helen Keller back to the safe house.

I can sit down and come up with about hundred more problems with the franchise, but most of them, like the most common complaints, tend to be because I’m trying to judge the game by the standards of a genre it doesn't belong in.
If you can't enjoy an apocalypse turned playground then play something else. However just because a game isn't in a genre like doesn't mean it deserves a rating of 2.0

If nothing else, for all you awkward guys, enjoy the ridiculous amount of "fan service," skimpy outfits, groan worthy-sex humor, etc...