Case Zero

The player controls protagonist Chuck Greene as he fights off hordes of zombies while accomplishing specific missions. The game includes several new objects that can be used to attack the zombies. Up to 7,000 zombies can be seen onscreen at the same time.

Dead Rising 2 allows players to manufacture their own custom weapons at various points in the game by collecting items and combining them together in maintenance rooms scattered across the game map. The player also has the ability to unlock "combo cards" that reveal weapons that can be combined together. Such combinations include the "Hail Mary", a hand grenade duct taped to a football, "Dynameat", a stick of dynamite duct taped to a piece of meat, the "Paddlesaw", two chainsaws duct taped to a kayak paddle, and "Spiked Bat" which is a baseball bat with nails hammered through.

Five years after the events of Dead Rising, former motocross champion Chuck Greene is in the casino town of Fortune City, Nevada, taking part in Terror Is Reality, a controversial sports entertainment game show where contestants kill zombies for money and fame. Chuck needs the prize money to buy Zombrex, a daily medication that suppresses the zombification process, for his young daughter, Katey; who was bitten by her zombified mother during a previous outbreak in Las Vegas.

While Chuck is backstage, the show's supply of zombies are released; Chuck rescues Katey and makes his way to an emergency shelter, which is sealed after their arrival. Head of security, Raymond Sullivan is initially reluctant to let the infected Katey in, but Chuck promises to keep her supplied with Zombrex until the military arrives in three days. Chuck ventures into the city to find a dose of Zombrex. Another survivor, Stacey Forsythe, a leader of a zombie rights organization protesting their treatment by Terror Is Reality, gives Chuck a map and two-way radio. She watches the shelter's security monitors and directs Chuck to other survivors or points of interest in the area.

Dead Rising 2 was announced on February 9, 2009, confirming earlier rumors of the game's existence, as well as a viral video for the game. The developers Blue Castle Games worked with Keiji Inafune, the original Dead Rising producer and Capcom's former global head of research and development, along with other original Dead Rising team members.

Capcom created a variety of websites before the release of the game. These include TapeitorDie.Com, visitfortunecity.com, and deadrising-2.com.

Dead Rising 2 received "generally favorable" reviews, according to review aggregator website Metacritic.

GameZone gave the Xbox 360 version of the game a 6 out of 10, stating, "the lackluster presentation, uninspired story, outright broken multiplayer, and atrocious amount of glitches makes Dead Rising 2 less of a flawed gem and more of a somewhat polished pile that incrementally smells worse the longer you let it sit in your disc drive."