The sequel to the million-plus selling Dead Rising, Dead Rising 2 sees the player take on the role of former Motocross champion Chuck Greene, who has come

In the world of Dead Rising 2, there's an activist organization known as CURE that pushes for the humane treatment of the living impaired. If only CURE realized just how much fun it can be to maim, behead, or otherwise massacre hordes of brain-craving zombies.

Clever and brutal weapon combinations; Focused mission structure keeps you moving; Psychopaths have disturbing backstories and offer challenging fights; Tons of hidden secrets to search for; Striving for completion in cooperative play is fun

Long and frequent load times; Controls are not always responsive

Dead Rising 2 builds further on the foundations of the quite enjoyable first game. This means amongst other things that the story doesn't matter much. Zombies are standard stuff and for Chuck Greene this means regularly giving his daughter a shot of Zombrex, a medicine that keeps his beloved one...

The original Dead Rising may have borrowed its core concept from horror classic Dawn of the Dead , but the level of absurdity in that game was completely unlike anything that preceded it.

Still immensely fun to kill zombies in droves with mundane items; weapon creation system adds whole new layer to game; Fortune City is a wonderland of fresh possibilities; online modes are worthwhile additions

. I like it a lot, but the biggest gripe I had with the game was the lead character. I understand the developers wanted to throw in a new lead to make the game stand apart from the first game, Dead Rising, but in the end we all missed Frank West, the photographer who became a hero in Willamette.

I've been calling 2011 a year of thirds in gaming - third entries in popular series - but it's just as much a year of slightly enhanced remakes, too. In Dead Rising 2: Off The Record , Capcom Vancouver (formerly Blue Castle Games) attempts to squash these two things together.

Chuck Greene is a man down on his luck. His wife died in the Las Vegas zombie outbreak. His daughter was bitten by none other than his wife after her zombification. Now Chuck has to give his daughter a drug known as Zombrex every single day to keep her from turning into a zombie too.

Capcom fixed a few flaws from the first game, but left a lot of them intact the second time around. That doesn't mean it isn't still a blast to explore Fortune City, just don't expect too much here and you won't be disappointed.

Dead Rising was an early example of what the then-new Xbox 360 hardware could do. Running through vast crowds of zombies in a mall was wish fulfillment for a generation of people raised on George Romero movies, and slaughtering them wholesale with improvised weaponry was blood-red icing on the cake.

Drinking coffee at my desk, I can feel just how weighty my mug is, probably enough to smash a forehead or two into hamburger helper. Actually, come to think of it, my stapler's on the hefty CQC-conducive side too. Oh yes, I could turn into a corporate commando.