Dead Rising 2: Off the Record

Dead Rising 2: Off the Record is an alternate retelling of the events of Dead Rising 2, this time from the perspective of Frank West, the photojournalist and hero of the very first game, who finds himself in the middle of the zombie apocalypse in Fortune City instead of Chuck Greene. Capcom Vancouver thus offered not merely a content expansion, but its own distinct variation on the same story framework, with different motivations and a completely different perspective from the main playable character.

The basic skeleton of the game stays the same as in Dead Rising 2 — an open game city full of zombie hordes, time-limited survival, rescuing terrified survivors, and fighting other survivor bosses who lost their minds in the crisis and became dangerous. The player can head to practically any open part of the city at any time, which encourages experimenting with different orders of completing tasks. Off the Record, however, adds new locations, revised side quests, and the return of Frank's iconic camera mechanic, through which the player earns points for capturing dramatic, grotesque, or bizarre moments of the catastrophe, setting the game apart from Chuck Greene's more straightforward approach in the series' original installment.

A wealth of new weapons, vehicles, and combo weapons assembled from materials found in stores gives the game the typical Dead Rising absurdity and dark humor that the whole series is so valued for among its fans. The presence of a time limit within which the main and side tasks must be completed remains one of the series' most characteristic and, at the same time, most debated elements, as it forces the player to carefully plan which of the desperate survivors they will set out to help and who they will instead leave to their fate. As a standalone, full-fledged title built on a familiar foundation, Off the Record offered fans the chance to experience the same catastrophe in a completely different way, and thanks to the return of the beloved Frank West, it was received more warmly by many than the entirely new character from the series' previous installment.