Fleshing out the storyline that surrounds Dead Rising 2 in much the same way as the well-received Case Zero, West manages to tie the previous two retail titles together with appearances from some familiar faces setting West and Greene on a journey to uncover the truth behind an evil zombie warehouse. Technically it's not a warehouse so much as a Biotech research facility, but thanks to some generic, blocky, cookie-cutter level design and a ridiculous over use of a tiny texture pallete you'd be hard pushed to tell this place apart from the back room of your local Argos.
The whole game looks almost identical throughout and the geometry and architecture are so basic that it's like the entire layout was rushed out in someone's spare time over a couple of weekends. Until now, every game in the series has thrived on variety and while Case Zero was short it still provided a good range of different locations to explore. Case West may last longer than its fellow digital release, but it provides a far less compelling experience thanks to the basic texturing and dearth of anywhere particularly interesting to explore, unless you happen to find server rooms and the same science labs copied and pasted several times over particularly thrilling.
There are some new weapons on offer, some of which do push the boat out in terms of extravagant dismemberment. Of particular note are the Zap N' Shine which mixes a floor buffing machine with an electric cattle prod and the rather nasty Shocker that sees two medical trays hooked up to a defibrillator and applied to a zombie's skull. The new weapons are definitely the highpoint of this release, it's just a shame that there isn't anything particularly interesting to use them on. Barring an end-game boss who struggles to land more than one or two hits on you during the whole fight, there are no crazed, wacky psychos to play with. Meanwhile there's a prolific over use of basic enemies armed with ranged weapons in the central area of the map (that's the larger of the rectangular box rooms in case you were wondering). The result of which is that you're almost always better off filling your inventory with the stock firearms, which incidentally are falling out of every nook and cranny you lay your eyes on, than taking the time and effort to track down the various component parts necessary to build the new weaponry. Using each of the new armaments on the zombies is fun for a couple of goes, but the repetitive, poorly structured environments and simple lack of any gameplay variety soon hit home just how empty an experience proceedings have become this time around.
Besides the main storyline the game has a small number of research staff for the player to aid, but the survivor missions are nothing more than cynically turned out chaff demonstrating a complete lack of imagination on the part of the designers. Many of these you can complete just by finding the person in question, either because they want a common item that you already have in your possession or because that's genuinely all you had to do, talk to them and press attack a couple of times. There are no escort missions and little more than a couple of real fetch quests to be found, so, despite featuring online co-op this time (unlike Case Zero), the game feels oddly solitary and lonely. There's simply no compelling reason to play through this with someone else when there's nothing all that fun to do. Particularly when the player can instead just load up its predecessor and get a far superior experience in a much larger and more interesting game. Warehouses have never been particularly high on the list of gamers' favourite locations so why Blue Castle thought it would make a good setting for a whole title, particularly given the excellence of the environments we've seen in past Dead Rising games is truly baffling.
Dead Rising Case West is a frankly dreary and mildly depressing release. The developers seem to think that if they shove a bunch of zombies in a big grey box, full of carbon-copied scenery and locations, then slap on another player they can get away with it. Instead all they've succeeded in doing is stripping out all the humour, charm and charisma found in the other games and replaced it with drudgery and an over reliance on Dead Rising's weakest element – shooting. With Case West all Capcom have achieved is tarnishing the reputation of an otherwise fantastic series. Stay away, save your time and money and read the plot synopsis on Wikipedia instead.