By the middle of the 2000s, the zombie genre had turned a page. With George A. Romero’s take on the zombie, primarily as a symbol of consumerist culture in Dawn of the Dead, slowly falling into the past, the modern zombie was viewed as little more than a violent marauder, a faceless mass dedicated to the sole purpose of visceral carnage, both as an actor of said carnage, or as an excusable victim. Within the context of zombie media, the death of a living being is the peak of misery, the failure of a group or society to protect its own, symbolic of the loss of innocence, while the true death of the undead is typically reserved for scenes of wanton brutality, either as an action set-piece, or to display the morbid mundanity of life in the apocalypse. Seeming valueless, the pop-culture zombie no longer stood in as a representative of any perceived plight, anxiety, or worry, instead becoming an unavoidable, vacant threat, something to expound the tension of the group, as opposed to being the source of tension in and of itself.
This change in style in the undead landscape paved the way for zombie works in general to experiment in presentation, taking the iconography of Romero’s of the Dead franchise and putting new spins on it, framing the end of the world in different lenses. In a way, 2006’s Dead Rising purely represents this experimentation, becoming a beacon of the era’s sensibilities, not only in technical and mechanical value, but as a symbol of where the horror genre was. Dead Rising, the splatstick masterpiece, found its place as the forerunner in gaming’s view of the undead, as an innumerable wave of ghoulish targets for what could fairly be called bullying, tied together with a feel that leaned serious in presentation, but often showed its hand at the surreal nonsense surrounding every second of gameplay. The tone defined the game, and in the same way that tone defined the growing landscape of zombie media.
So, as hype for a sequel swept through the scene, and as Dead Rising 2 entered development, it made sense that it would attempt to follow the vibe set by its progenitor while also tracing the energy of the new decade of horror. Released at the dawn of the 2010s, this sequel aimed to go bigger, bolder, and dumber than its already ludicrous prequel, but along the way, something… changed. What once was a splatterhouse comedy now felt mean-spirited, cruel in a way that felt absent from its predecessor. Somewhere along the way, through the change in developer from Capcom Production Studio 1 to Blue Castle Games (later known as Capcom Vancouver), the magic of what made Dead Rising feel unique was lost, replacing it with a colder, rougher, harder-edged soul.
Feeding off the harsher aesthetic of late 2000s horror, with the advent of the torture porn subgenre and the exploitation revival in full swing, Dead Rising 2 sees a world that lacks the spirit of the original, all in the hopes of endless escalation. It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact moment you can tell things are going to be for the worse… perhaps it starts with seeing how the game has moved to hardcore male gaze pandering with every single woman in sight. Perhaps it's the fact that you can’t go fifteen steps without a Playboy cover filling the screen. Maybe it’s noticing how you’re expected to have moved on from the ubiquitous mini-chainsaws and conventional firearms of Dead Rising to Firework Launchers, M60-toting plushies, Serv-bot brain blenders, and Knuckles-approved Knife Gloves as your bread-and-butter zombie dispatchers. It’s not as if the series was known for an sort of basis in reality, as anything other than an excuse to throw you into a messy sandbox bound to an anxiety-inducing timer, but seeing such a sharp lean into try-hard jokes makes the humor of the original shine ever so clearer.
Dead Rising 2 is… disappointing. In an attempt to solidify the foundation built by Dead Rising, the sequel works only to sully the perfection that came before it, over-polishing a knowingly messy work and filing off any sense of personality in the process. It’s still a mechanically and technically impressive work, and its attempts to build on Dead Rising’s formula are admirable, but they all serve to push the series in a direction that feels completely at odds with the prequel.
This change in style in the undead landscape paved the way for zombie works in general to experiment in presentation, taking the iconography of Romero’s of the Dead franchise and putting new spins on it, framing the end of the world in different lenses. In a way, 2006’s Dead Rising purely represents this experimentation, becoming a beacon of the era’s sensibilities, not only in technical and mechanical value, but as a symbol of where the horror genre was. Dead Rising, the splatstick masterpiece, found its place as the forerunner in gaming’s view of the undead, as an innumerable wave of ghoulish targets for what could fairly be called bullying, tied together with a feel that leaned serious in presentation, but often showed its hand at the surreal nonsense surrounding every second of gameplay. The tone defined the game, and in the same way that tone defined the growing landscape of zombie media.
So, as hype for a sequel swept through the scene, and as Dead Rising 2 entered development, it made sense that it would attempt to follow the vibe set by its progenitor while also tracing the energy of the new decade of horror. Released at the dawn of the 2010s, this sequel aimed to go bigger, bolder, and dumber than its already ludicrous prequel, but along the way, something… changed. What once was a splatterhouse comedy now felt mean-spirited, cruel in a way that felt absent from its predecessor. Somewhere along the way, through the change in developer from Capcom Production Studio 1 to Blue Castle Games (later known as Capcom Vancouver), the magic of what made Dead Rising feel unique was lost, replacing it with a colder, rougher, harder-edged soul.
Feeding off the harsher aesthetic of late 2000s horror, with the advent of the torture porn subgenre and the exploitation revival in full swing, Dead Rising 2 sees a world that lacks the spirit of the original, all in the hopes of endless escalation. It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact moment you can tell things are going to be for the worse… perhaps it starts with seeing how the game has moved to hardcore male gaze pandering with every single woman in sight. Perhaps it's the fact that you can’t go fifteen steps without a Playboy cover filling the screen. Maybe it’s noticing how you’re expected to have moved on from the ubiquitous mini-chainsaws and conventional firearms of Dead Rising to Firework Launchers, M60-toting plushies, Serv-bot brain blenders, and Knuckles-approved Knife Gloves as your bread-and-butter zombie dispatchers. It’s not as if the series was known for an sort of basis in reality, as anything other than an excuse to throw you into a messy sandbox bound to an anxiety-inducing timer, but seeing such a sharp lean into try-hard jokes makes the humor of the original shine ever so clearer.
Dead Rising 2 is… disappointing. In an attempt to solidify the foundation built by Dead Rising, the sequel works only to sully the perfection that came before it, over-polishing a knowingly messy work and filing off any sense of personality in the process. It’s still a mechanically and technically impressive work, and its attempts to build on Dead Rising’s formula are admirable, but they all serve to push the series in a direction that feels completely at odds with the prequel.