Dead Rising 2: Case Zero

Case Zero is a digital prequel that Capcom used as a trial run before releasing the full Dead Rising 2 – a small, self-contained piece of story set in the abandoned desert town of Still Creek, where new hero Chuck Greene, along with his sick daughter Katey, gets stranded on the way to the Fortune City tournament. His daughter needs regular doses of the drug Zombrex to keep from turning into one of the undead herself, and obtaining this drug, together with finding a way to get their car back on the road, forms the main narrative backbone of the whole story. The format is deliberately intimate: one compact location, a handful of side quests, a few survivors to rescue, and a couple of hours of gameplay, which made it an ideal preview of what the main installment had to offer, without the player having to wait for its full release. The motel, gas station, and a few shops along the main road offer a smaller but densely populated environment full of improvised hazards, where the basics of survival can easily be learned before the player steps into the far more sprawling Fortune City.

It is in Case Zero that the iconic weapon-combining system first appears, which later became one of the main features of Dead Rising 2 – here the player assembles mismatched items like a chainsaw and a hockey stick, crafting them into upgraded or entirely new tools for killing zombies, which can be done right at a workshop on the town's main street – a principle that players subsequently got to enjoy on a much larger scale in the full game. The title was released as a cheap digital download on Xbox Live Arcade even before Dead Rising 2's official launch, and it functioned both as a promotional preview and as a small standalone experience with its own self-contained story, in which the accumulated progress, character level, and money could additionally be partially carried over into the main game after its release, so the player didn't start completely from scratch.

Why play it: Case Zero is ideal for series fans who want to see where the combined-weapon system originated and experience a compact, easily digestible dose of zombie action without committing to dozens of hours of the full game.