It's clearly been designed around the return of Frank's camera, offering up opportunity after opportunity for high-scoring, hilarious photos of zombies entangled in futuristic machinery. The Uranus zone – the one entirely new area – is a sort of 50s sci-fi theme park, with zombies clad in neon hoops and plenty of rides that can be manipulated into death traps.
All those scores then feed into global leaderboards, which Leigh is hoping will be a more effective multiplayer hook than the original game's Terror is Reality. Dropped straight onto a Fortune City rooftop by a helicopter - "this is my vacation!", shouts Frank West – you can wander around the city at will, seeking out hovering stars that start up creative zombie-killing challenges and reward you with medals that gradually unlock more and more difficult and unusual tasks. "People were saying from the beginning, why has this new guy come in and taken over the series? So we took that as an opportunity to make the game again with Frank West, but rather than cut and paste the hero in and call it done, we undertook a bunch of revisions to the game." The most important addition is Sandbox Mode, a free-roaming zombie-murder extravaganza without a story or a time limit to rein you in – like Dead Rising's Infinity mode, then, but with added optional challenges. YES NO Why bother, though? Did Capcom Vancouver feel that Dead Rising 2 was just unfinished? If you're going to bring back Frank West, why not put him in a totally new game? "There are a number of reasons why this came to pass, but really the biggest was the fan outcry around Chuck Greene," says Jason. I think that we did exactly what we should have done with Dead Rising 2." "Capcom Vancouver, which was Blue Castle at the time, had a lot of creative control over Dead Rising 2 and the direction that we sent it in, pushing Capcom Japan to let us make things a little more Western, and with the new character, too, we really feel like we have ownership over that game and the franchise. "Chuck was our character," says Executive Producer Jason Leigh.
After stamping the series with its own distinctive personality in the form of Chuck Greene and his story, Capcom Vancouver now feels comfortable returning to Frank West. He changed the game's tone, and removed a lot of the ambiguity that fascinated me in the first game.īut Dead Rising: Off the Record isn't a correction. He was a more earnest character than Frank West, and didn't have the same satiric swagger. Whilst the three save slots, vastly improved gun controls and various other Westerner-friendly changes improved the meat and bones of the Dead Rising experience, Chuck Greene gave the story a different feel. Either way, Dead Rising 2 had a distinctly different flavour. I could never figure out whether the original Dead Rising was a spoof or just a very, very weird (and very Japanese) interpretation of classic zombie horror.