Dead Rising 2: Case Zero
released on Aug 31, 2010
Dead Rising 2: Case Zero, will introduce main protagonist and former motocross champion Chuck Greene and provide a link between the original game and the events that await players in the gambling paradise of Fortune City.
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To be honest I barely remember this game. I remember it made me very excited for the full DR2 release.
Xbox Series X Retrocompatible
Juego corto que puede servir como introducción a la saga. Cumple con lo que es.
no comments.
This review contains spoilers
Dead Rising 2: Case Zero is a prequel DLC/short expansion developed by Blue Castle Games (later Capcom Vancouver) and released as an exclusive on the Xbox Live Marketplace for around five dollars. As a short teaser, it was released around a month or so before the base game in 2010 on August 31st and would allow for players to not only get a taste for what the base game would end up playing like and allow for development of the two main leads, but would allow for players to unlock combo cards and level up (to a level cap of 5) to be transferred over to the base game for when it released. This release was evidently successful as it attracted over 300,000 downloads in the first week of release, though whether that was due to it being released free for Xbox Live players or if that included actual purchases is unknown. I don’t really remember my history with this DLC nor do I remember in what order I played Dead Rising 2 but if I remember correctly I might’ve played the original game on launch on the Xbox 360 back when I didn’t have Xbox Live (also back when I rented from the local game store in town). I wouldn’t end up playing Case Zero until 2013, when according to my achievements I’d play through some of it in August and then actually playing through the entire thing on December 1st of 2013 where I ended up getting all of the achievements for the game. Since then, I don’t remember much of when I played it again or if I even played it again until literally more than a decade later when I ended up playing it again on 1/7/2024 as a part of some Dead Rising retrospective series. Having played and beaten Dead Rising 2, Off the Record and 3 last year; I felt that I might as well hit up the rest of the series as a part of my “beat one game per console” goal, and I guess Case West (which I beat on 1/5/2024) and Case Zero count as my Xbox 360 games of the year though that could change at any point.
The plot to Case Zero starts with the aftermath of the Las Vegas outbreak, with protagonist Chuck Greene having fled with his daughter Katey out of the city and into the town of Still Creek. It’s immediately noticeable that Katey’s been bitten, specifically by her then undead mother (now probably just dead). Chuck gives her a bit of Zombrex before investigating the nearby gas station for supplies before being distracted by loud ass noises, which culminates in them witnessing more zombies pop out of the woodwork. His truck is stolen by some dickie douchebag and Chuck barricades himself and his daughter inside of the station. Resolving to do whatever it means to get out of Still Creek as well as find some Zombrex for his daughter (with the rest of his stash stolen in the truck). Chuck heads towards the smoke outside the town to find the remains of a destroyed military quarantine camp, and manages to find some Zombrex in an overturned ambulance. From here he overhears from a walkie talkie that a backup military quarantine crew will be there in 12 hours and seeing the remains of a motorcycle inside of a bin, he resolves to escape the town with his daughter and makes his way back to the gas station to begin his escape plan.
The game from here is honestly really simple, and short. You need to gather all five motorcycle parts around the map, being given directions from both survivor Bob as well as pawn shop owner Dick (if you buy his hints) and you walk around the small town to gather the parts you need. Once you do that (locations of all parts down in the Gameplay section), Chuck manages to repair his bike and injects Katey with another dose of Zombrex before encountering a nasty surprise: Jed. See, Jed is a hillbilly mechanic who has a love for “the hunt” and noticing that Chuck gave his daughter Zombrex, proceeds to attempt to murder her because the way he thinks about it, she’s a zombie anyways who hasn’t turned. Chuck proceeds to fight to the death with Jed, and after Jed stumbles and is smashed with the remains of a giant car, Chuck finishes the repairs on his bike. Grabbing Katey and hopping on the bike, the military proceed to surround the town and demand his surrender. This doesn’t work as Chuck manages to make his way out of town in a two minute chase sequence, before ending up in the desert. Turns out, the truck thief didn’t make it that far and died, so Chuck stops by and loots the truck of the Zombrex stash and personal belongings before splitting.
I like the plot for this game a lot, as it’s not a lore heavy “who did it” mystery or anything along those lines as much as it is a character driven story. It’s an establishing shot for Chuck Greene, and more specifically his world and values as he deals with the outbreak of zombies. His character moments in this game are something I actually really enjoyed, with a lot of heartfelt dialogue and bonding moments between him and his daughter. I think after playing this again, I’ve come out of this liking Chuck a lot more than I used to. It did the job successfully of making me want more, even if I already had more after playing the rest of the series. The only questions I had were “What happened to the survivors you rescued” and “How did Still Creek even get infected with zombies?”. Logically speaking, the first one was answered with “put into military quarantine” and the second one was answered in a tie-in comic book “Dead Rising: Road to Fortune City”, where it’s explained that Harjit Singh (the Sikh guy from Case West), threw a bunch of queens out of the window just to be a dick. Real fun stuff, and love me a bit of the extra lore. Overall, a nice small bite (no pun intended) DLC whose time I really enjoyed playing.
The gameplay in Dead Rising 2: Case Zero is something you could consider a small slice of the base Dead Rising 2 pie: of course there are survivors to rescue, a timer with objectives to do before a certain mark or else you get one of multiple endings, crazy combo weapons, a decent sized area to explore and psychopaths to hunt. Each and every one of those is there, but it’s just in a smaller way. Let’s take the size of Still Creek for example: the amount of space you’re allowed to roam in would maybe be almost as big if not the same size as one of the casinos in Dead Rising 2 if I were to make a guess. The town in itself doesn’t have every building unlocked of course, you kind of have to explore and parkour around the buildings to find your way into every entrance (and it’s kind of required if you want to get all of the survivors) and has just enough depth for a DLC of this scale to warrant some good shit points. Combo weapons you can only really get a couple of (like the Spiked Bat, the Molotov, the Pitchfork/Shotgun Boomstick combo, and like two others) by completing quests/combining them on your own when the flashing white circle around the blue labeled objects (you know the one with the wrench on them).
How the survivors work in this game compared to Dead Rising 2 and Case West are a little bit different: in Dead Rising 2 you get calls from Stacey when a survivor pops up and in Case West you kind of run into them and learn about certain things from environmental context clues. In Case Zero, one of the survivors named Bob will be hanging out on top of a building and unloading assault rifle bullets into the undead. Throughout the entire day, Bob will wave to you repeatedly in certain instances when he finds a survivor and you’ll have to climb up the building in order to talk to him and from there he’ll relay the quest needed to find the survivors. As for the main objective, it’s basically a free-for-all as you’re given the goal of finding all of the bike parts so you can repair it and get out of town with Katey. Most of them are located in random places (the gas right by the gas station, the engine in the alleyway next to the movie theater) while some of the other parts might require a bit of finagling through quests (like finding a key inside of the hotel to open a shed, or breaking into a nearby hunting sword to give it to a motocross rider to get a pair of bike handlebars). The last part of course is the wheel, and that will come from the pawn shop, which brings me to the next point.
The pawn shop, ran by Dick, is where you’ll end up having to pay money for information (as well as certain combo weapons, an extra zombrex for a survivor, etc.) if you’re unable to find all of these parts of your own volition as Dick “still needs to make a living”. Luckily, if you’re worried about where to find it, now you know. You just need to wait til the end of the day for Bob to give you the quest to find the Motocross guys. Again for the most part, it’s a small slice of what the base game would eventually give on a bigger scale and there’s nothing wrong with that. Nothing says this more than the boss battle against Jed, which is the second to last set piece in the game and the only psychopath you’ll be able to fight. However, keep in mind the level cap is to Level 5 so you won’t get a lot in the way of evasive maneuvers in order to fight him so the combat will probably feel a little bit more on the sluggish side as you swing and/or shoot at him while he grapples you, burns you with an acetylene torch and shoots you repeatedly. The game’s final chase sequence also gives you a first hand look at how the motorcycle will operate in the base game, which gives you a minute or two to escape the town along a certain route or else you’ll get one of the bad endings. Overall, if you like how Dead Rising 2 feels then you’ll feel right at home with this DLC, it’ll just be a stripped down experience for the most part, like tutorial baby steps.
Graphically speaking it’s about the same as Case West was: it looks like an Xbox 360 game but upscaled a bit on the Xbox One through backwards compatibility, with a little bit of vaseline smear looking shit to match up with it. However it honestly isn’t the worst thing and it looks like Dead Rising 2 so stylistically it’s perfectly fine. In fact, I’ll even say that atmospherically it’s pretty damn solid and a lot more interesting than what we ended up getting with Case West. It’s a VERY small area, but a small area with personality. Still Creek as a small town has this sort of old south western aesthetic mixed in with a modern light that could come out of a modern western movie. You’ll enter the local movie theater and see slot machines sitting there as one of the town’s only sources of income, climb up the broken fire escape to the old hotel to see a place that’s probably been abandoned or at least neglected for years. Go to the sheriff’s office and you’ll find whiskey’s all over the place and a shotgun, with a bulletin board that looks like a literal wanted poster (with easter eggs of course).
The survivors you find will either be outsiders from the town (like motocross bikers or a couple who went to nearby Las Vegas and barely escaped with their life as well as most of their earnings from the trip) to town civilians (pawnshop owner Dick as well as gun enthusiast Bob and his daughter Darcie. In a way, I wouldn’t mind seeing a future Dead Rising setting placed in a sort of environment like this down south as I think it would genuinely work, especially considering the small town is covered head to toe in zombies. Granted it’s not thousands of zombies, in fact I think Still Creek could probably barely hit 250 is my guess, but still a small town and a bunch of zombies in a closed off and claustrophobic area makes me think of a potential future. Either way, atmospherically I can’t really complain about my time in Still Creek.
The sound design for this game will also be a really small paragraph or so like Case West, as most if not all of the sound design most likely came from Dead Rising 2, or at the very least there wasn’t much in the way of uniqueness I could tell sound wise that was exclusive to Case Zero. Same thing with the soundtrack, there weren't really any tracks that popped out that probably weren't already in the base game or were memorable so I can’t say much to this regard. I guess if I was to address anything noticeable as something other than “It’s more Dead Rising 2”, voice acting wise Peter Flemming plays Chuck here and plays him in a way that I like a lot more than Dead Rising 2. In Dead Rising 2 he had a lot more dad jokes and while others would argue that it gives him more of a personality, I actually enjoyed his more somber and loving dad performance here as it felt a lot more authentic and real. The only other voice actors/actresses to note are Allyson Armstrong as Katey Greene (who plays her in the base game as well and sounds like a little girl so it works) but Brian Dobson as Jed the mechanic certainly gave off not safe inbred hillbilly vibes and it worked to make him a threatening presence towards the end of the game.
Dead Rising 2: Case Zero was one of those DLCs that I was genuinely surprised by replaying it again. I genuinely thought it was just going to be a one note and boring experience that I would get through once and then forget about it and never play it again. Will I ever play it again? I don’t know but what I can say is that I had a fun time. It was a decent and well balanced small taste of what the base game would eventually become, all while delivering a little inside look into the story of Chuck Greene and his daughter Katey and having it set in a town that I felt had a lot more personality atmospherically than Case West would deliver. I’ll just say right now that like Case West, I’m very much sad at the fact that this DLC is exclusive to just the Xbox Marketplace and isn’t released on the PC along with Dead Rising 2 and Dead Rising 2: Off the Record. Truth be told, I feel like a remaster of all of these games would probably be in a good order (or at least a bunch of bug fixes and patches because Jesus H Christ they aren’t the best by any standards. However, like the future of Dead Rising in general, it seems that all hope was just kind of abandoned for the series and that none of these DLC seem likely to ever get a port.
For the time being though, after the success of the DLC came the release of Dead Rising 2 itself which ended up selling 2.2 Million copies in 2011 along with the success of the Case West DLC, which I didn’t find any sales or download numbers but critically speaking it was praised. Beyond that though was a history full of uncertainty and a lot of frustrations for the guys at Blue Castle Games, which would later be bought out by Capcom and turned into Capcom Vancouver. I’m hoping one day that Capcom will give the series the treatment it deserves but for now, who knows what will actually happen or not. I guess time will tell what the future will be, if there is any.
Links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Rising_2
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1744763/
https://deadrising.fandom.com/wiki/Dead_Rising_2:_Case_Zero
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/DeadRising2
The plot to Case Zero starts with the aftermath of the Las Vegas outbreak, with protagonist Chuck Greene having fled with his daughter Katey out of the city and into the town of Still Creek. It’s immediately noticeable that Katey’s been bitten, specifically by her then undead mother (now probably just dead). Chuck gives her a bit of Zombrex before investigating the nearby gas station for supplies before being distracted by loud ass noises, which culminates in them witnessing more zombies pop out of the woodwork. His truck is stolen by some dickie douchebag and Chuck barricades himself and his daughter inside of the station. Resolving to do whatever it means to get out of Still Creek as well as find some Zombrex for his daughter (with the rest of his stash stolen in the truck). Chuck heads towards the smoke outside the town to find the remains of a destroyed military quarantine camp, and manages to find some Zombrex in an overturned ambulance. From here he overhears from a walkie talkie that a backup military quarantine crew will be there in 12 hours and seeing the remains of a motorcycle inside of a bin, he resolves to escape the town with his daughter and makes his way back to the gas station to begin his escape plan.
The game from here is honestly really simple, and short. You need to gather all five motorcycle parts around the map, being given directions from both survivor Bob as well as pawn shop owner Dick (if you buy his hints) and you walk around the small town to gather the parts you need. Once you do that (locations of all parts down in the Gameplay section), Chuck manages to repair his bike and injects Katey with another dose of Zombrex before encountering a nasty surprise: Jed. See, Jed is a hillbilly mechanic who has a love for “the hunt” and noticing that Chuck gave his daughter Zombrex, proceeds to attempt to murder her because the way he thinks about it, she’s a zombie anyways who hasn’t turned. Chuck proceeds to fight to the death with Jed, and after Jed stumbles and is smashed with the remains of a giant car, Chuck finishes the repairs on his bike. Grabbing Katey and hopping on the bike, the military proceed to surround the town and demand his surrender. This doesn’t work as Chuck manages to make his way out of town in a two minute chase sequence, before ending up in the desert. Turns out, the truck thief didn’t make it that far and died, so Chuck stops by and loots the truck of the Zombrex stash and personal belongings before splitting.
I like the plot for this game a lot, as it’s not a lore heavy “who did it” mystery or anything along those lines as much as it is a character driven story. It’s an establishing shot for Chuck Greene, and more specifically his world and values as he deals with the outbreak of zombies. His character moments in this game are something I actually really enjoyed, with a lot of heartfelt dialogue and bonding moments between him and his daughter. I think after playing this again, I’ve come out of this liking Chuck a lot more than I used to. It did the job successfully of making me want more, even if I already had more after playing the rest of the series. The only questions I had were “What happened to the survivors you rescued” and “How did Still Creek even get infected with zombies?”. Logically speaking, the first one was answered with “put into military quarantine” and the second one was answered in a tie-in comic book “Dead Rising: Road to Fortune City”, where it’s explained that Harjit Singh (the Sikh guy from Case West), threw a bunch of queens out of the window just to be a dick. Real fun stuff, and love me a bit of the extra lore. Overall, a nice small bite (no pun intended) DLC whose time I really enjoyed playing.
The gameplay in Dead Rising 2: Case Zero is something you could consider a small slice of the base Dead Rising 2 pie: of course there are survivors to rescue, a timer with objectives to do before a certain mark or else you get one of multiple endings, crazy combo weapons, a decent sized area to explore and psychopaths to hunt. Each and every one of those is there, but it’s just in a smaller way. Let’s take the size of Still Creek for example: the amount of space you’re allowed to roam in would maybe be almost as big if not the same size as one of the casinos in Dead Rising 2 if I were to make a guess. The town in itself doesn’t have every building unlocked of course, you kind of have to explore and parkour around the buildings to find your way into every entrance (and it’s kind of required if you want to get all of the survivors) and has just enough depth for a DLC of this scale to warrant some good shit points. Combo weapons you can only really get a couple of (like the Spiked Bat, the Molotov, the Pitchfork/Shotgun Boomstick combo, and like two others) by completing quests/combining them on your own when the flashing white circle around the blue labeled objects (you know the one with the wrench on them).
How the survivors work in this game compared to Dead Rising 2 and Case West are a little bit different: in Dead Rising 2 you get calls from Stacey when a survivor pops up and in Case West you kind of run into them and learn about certain things from environmental context clues. In Case Zero, one of the survivors named Bob will be hanging out on top of a building and unloading assault rifle bullets into the undead. Throughout the entire day, Bob will wave to you repeatedly in certain instances when he finds a survivor and you’ll have to climb up the building in order to talk to him and from there he’ll relay the quest needed to find the survivors. As for the main objective, it’s basically a free-for-all as you’re given the goal of finding all of the bike parts so you can repair it and get out of town with Katey. Most of them are located in random places (the gas right by the gas station, the engine in the alleyway next to the movie theater) while some of the other parts might require a bit of finagling through quests (like finding a key inside of the hotel to open a shed, or breaking into a nearby hunting sword to give it to a motocross rider to get a pair of bike handlebars). The last part of course is the wheel, and that will come from the pawn shop, which brings me to the next point.
The pawn shop, ran by Dick, is where you’ll end up having to pay money for information (as well as certain combo weapons, an extra zombrex for a survivor, etc.) if you’re unable to find all of these parts of your own volition as Dick “still needs to make a living”. Luckily, if you’re worried about where to find it, now you know. You just need to wait til the end of the day for Bob to give you the quest to find the Motocross guys. Again for the most part, it’s a small slice of what the base game would eventually give on a bigger scale and there’s nothing wrong with that. Nothing says this more than the boss battle against Jed, which is the second to last set piece in the game and the only psychopath you’ll be able to fight. However, keep in mind the level cap is to Level 5 so you won’t get a lot in the way of evasive maneuvers in order to fight him so the combat will probably feel a little bit more on the sluggish side as you swing and/or shoot at him while he grapples you, burns you with an acetylene torch and shoots you repeatedly. The game’s final chase sequence also gives you a first hand look at how the motorcycle will operate in the base game, which gives you a minute or two to escape the town along a certain route or else you’ll get one of the bad endings. Overall, if you like how Dead Rising 2 feels then you’ll feel right at home with this DLC, it’ll just be a stripped down experience for the most part, like tutorial baby steps.
Graphically speaking it’s about the same as Case West was: it looks like an Xbox 360 game but upscaled a bit on the Xbox One through backwards compatibility, with a little bit of vaseline smear looking shit to match up with it. However it honestly isn’t the worst thing and it looks like Dead Rising 2 so stylistically it’s perfectly fine. In fact, I’ll even say that atmospherically it’s pretty damn solid and a lot more interesting than what we ended up getting with Case West. It’s a VERY small area, but a small area with personality. Still Creek as a small town has this sort of old south western aesthetic mixed in with a modern light that could come out of a modern western movie. You’ll enter the local movie theater and see slot machines sitting there as one of the town’s only sources of income, climb up the broken fire escape to the old hotel to see a place that’s probably been abandoned or at least neglected for years. Go to the sheriff’s office and you’ll find whiskey’s all over the place and a shotgun, with a bulletin board that looks like a literal wanted poster (with easter eggs of course).
The survivors you find will either be outsiders from the town (like motocross bikers or a couple who went to nearby Las Vegas and barely escaped with their life as well as most of their earnings from the trip) to town civilians (pawnshop owner Dick as well as gun enthusiast Bob and his daughter Darcie. In a way, I wouldn’t mind seeing a future Dead Rising setting placed in a sort of environment like this down south as I think it would genuinely work, especially considering the small town is covered head to toe in zombies. Granted it’s not thousands of zombies, in fact I think Still Creek could probably barely hit 250 is my guess, but still a small town and a bunch of zombies in a closed off and claustrophobic area makes me think of a potential future. Either way, atmospherically I can’t really complain about my time in Still Creek.
The sound design for this game will also be a really small paragraph or so like Case West, as most if not all of the sound design most likely came from Dead Rising 2, or at the very least there wasn’t much in the way of uniqueness I could tell sound wise that was exclusive to Case Zero. Same thing with the soundtrack, there weren't really any tracks that popped out that probably weren't already in the base game or were memorable so I can’t say much to this regard. I guess if I was to address anything noticeable as something other than “It’s more Dead Rising 2”, voice acting wise Peter Flemming plays Chuck here and plays him in a way that I like a lot more than Dead Rising 2. In Dead Rising 2 he had a lot more dad jokes and while others would argue that it gives him more of a personality, I actually enjoyed his more somber and loving dad performance here as it felt a lot more authentic and real. The only other voice actors/actresses to note are Allyson Armstrong as Katey Greene (who plays her in the base game as well and sounds like a little girl so it works) but Brian Dobson as Jed the mechanic certainly gave off not safe inbred hillbilly vibes and it worked to make him a threatening presence towards the end of the game.
Dead Rising 2: Case Zero was one of those DLCs that I was genuinely surprised by replaying it again. I genuinely thought it was just going to be a one note and boring experience that I would get through once and then forget about it and never play it again. Will I ever play it again? I don’t know but what I can say is that I had a fun time. It was a decent and well balanced small taste of what the base game would eventually become, all while delivering a little inside look into the story of Chuck Greene and his daughter Katey and having it set in a town that I felt had a lot more personality atmospherically than Case West would deliver. I’ll just say right now that like Case West, I’m very much sad at the fact that this DLC is exclusive to just the Xbox Marketplace and isn’t released on the PC along with Dead Rising 2 and Dead Rising 2: Off the Record. Truth be told, I feel like a remaster of all of these games would probably be in a good order (or at least a bunch of bug fixes and patches because Jesus H Christ they aren’t the best by any standards. However, like the future of Dead Rising in general, it seems that all hope was just kind of abandoned for the series and that none of these DLC seem likely to ever get a port.
For the time being though, after the success of the DLC came the release of Dead Rising 2 itself which ended up selling 2.2 Million copies in 2011 along with the success of the Case West DLC, which I didn’t find any sales or download numbers but critically speaking it was praised. Beyond that though was a history full of uncertainty and a lot of frustrations for the guys at Blue Castle Games, which would later be bought out by Capcom and turned into Capcom Vancouver. I’m hoping one day that Capcom will give the series the treatment it deserves but for now, who knows what will actually happen or not. I guess time will tell what the future will be, if there is any.
Links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Rising_2
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1744763/
https://deadrising.fandom.com/wiki/Dead_Rising_2:_Case_Zero
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/DeadRising2
Nice little preview