Dead Rising 2: Off the Record (Xbox 360)

Dead Rising 2: Off the Record is a reimagining of Dead Rising 2, where Frank West from the original DR is the playable character over Chuck Greene. Released in 2011, only a number of months after DR2s release, it became the fourth DR2 game following Case Zero, Case West and the original second game. The story is practically the same, just with some slight changes, most of them I actually preferred too.

For those that played DR2 will know there's not a lot of difference, besides playing as Frank and some story changes, the only new features are a new area to explore, challenges and free roam. The new area is in the form of a space theme park, it's a decent sized area and even has some mini carnival games to have fun with. Free mode explains itself, you can't do any of the story during it, but you can freely run around and kill all the zombies you want. Challenges feature in the free roam mode and can be do single-player or co-operatively.

What's a great improvement here is if you play coop, your partner plays as Chuck, so together you're Frank and Chuck. In DR2 you both played as Chuck. It was great to see the game star Frank, he's the star character in the DR franchise and was well performed again and slotted right in as Chuck's replacement. Once again, you are rewarded with more story if you complete all the cases, Overtime Mode makes a return and gives the real ending of the story when you finish it. Some character changes I appreciated too, I was glad with pretty much all the story changes from the second game, apart from a ridiculous and out of place boss fight. Chuck Greene featured in the story too, he became a psychopath and was a stand in for the biker psychopath from DR2. It was so well done, made sense of how he went crazy and explained Chuck's part in the story. It was sad to see how the mighty Chuck had fallen though.

The cases were pretty much exactly the same, everything we had already done in the second game and it felt cheap that a new game was released with nothing new in the story. A couple of glitches appeared, as I did a drop kick to Tk, he charged at the same time and I started to endlessly fall through the map, thankfully my coop partner could still fight TK and finished the fight. In the challenges, you were given times to get the gold medal. One challenge had us reach the marker in 45 seconds, we got there on 44 and a gold medal was shown, then when we were returned to the game, only a silver medal was given.

The game is practically just a cash in, but I enjoyed it, mainly because DR2 was already a good game. It was great to play as Frank as we knew him and the story changes were welcomed. For a fair price I'd recommend it and if you never played the original DR2, then maybe skip it and get this as the story changes are an improvement.

7.6/10