Game Reviews

Dead Rising 2: Case Zero is kind of difficult to judge. While it is a standalone title, it's not really a full game per se. It is, essentially, DLC for a game that hasn't been released yet, an extension of Dead Rising 2. Of course, no one has had that experience yet, meaning that Case Zero serves double duty as a demo as well. It's an interesting experiment for Capcom and for the industry in general; thankfully for Dead Rising fans, it pays off.Case Zero takes place three years before the events of Dead Rising 2, in a town called Still Creek a few dozen miles from Las Vegas. It's here that renowned motocross star Chuck Greene and his daughter, Katie, are stranded in the wake of a zombie outbreak and, making things worse, someone made off with Chuck's truck during the panic. Now Chuck has to repair a broken down motorcycle and find a way to keep his undead-bitten daughter from turning.

Luckily, as Chuck tells Katie, "Daddy can fix anything," so all he needs is to find the right parts. The parts, naturally, are scattered all over town, meaning Chuck has to wade through a sea of zombies -- and bring each part back through said sea -- all within a single in-game day. In other words, apart from a slightly different storyline and shorter time limit, the overall thrust of Case Zero is the same as its retail big brother: Kill zombies with makeshift weapons, find Zombrex -- an anti-zombification drug -- for Katie, save other civilians and find a way out of town before the military arrives.