Off The Record may go down as one of the weirdest game expansions of all time, and not just because of the normally high weirdness factor present in Dead Rising games. Initially I thought Off the Record was the PS3 version of the previously Xbox exclusive Case West expansion that tacked on a Frank West story to the end of the story in Dead Rising 2. Not so.

Off the Record is a complete reimagining of the entire Dead Rising 2 campaign with Frank cast as the hero and elements of the plot altered to suit this new character. It’s an altered universe version of Dead Rising 2, where Frank is the hero of the story and previous hero, Chuck Greene, is relegated to dangerous psycho status. As I said, weird.

So if you’ve played and completed Dead Rising 2 before (as I did for my previous review) then you’ve played about 85% of this game all ready, albeit with a different character. It’s very strange, as if Capcom heard the complaints from some quarters that people missed Frank West and decided what the hell, let’s swap out the characters, drop the daughter plot, tweak the ending and resell the game. It’s like the producers of Drive decided to distribute it a second time, only taking out Ryan Gosling and adding in Jason Statham because they thought that was what people wanted.

Not that I’m denying Frank is a popular character, I loved his whole sleazy photo journalist turned reluctant hero in Dead Rising and both the sleaze and reluctance have been turned up for this pseudo sequel. I even lamented the loss of Frank in my Dead Rising 2 review. But it’s not like we’re talking about an iconic character here, a Masterchief or Mario.

The man with the cam is back with a plan, or a rough approximation of a scheme at any rate

Of course the game could have deep metatextual meanings, maybe the Dead Rising series is heading into fractured reality territories. Maybe there’s layers upon layers of zombie plagued realities and West and Greene are two souls trapped between dimensions, forced into the same scenarios over and over, like Michel Moorecocks cursed meta hero characters that made up the eternal champion.

Or, and admittedly more likely, Capcom wanted to sell the same game twice and felt adding in the word Ultra, Mega or Overdrive before the title would have been too telling. All to capture Dead Rising fans a second time and to get those people who skipped the sequel due to no Frank and his war photography.

If you’re new to the Dead Rising universe here’s a primer. In this world there are zombies, zombification is caused by an infection and can be treated with a medicine called zombrex. In a novel twist zombies are used in a sadistic game show that involves contestants killing as many as they can as quickly as they can. In the game’s opening moments the game show zombies are released and all hell breaks loose. Our hero Chuck, I mean Frank, has to get to the bottom of the zombie outbreak and save as many people as he can before the army gets there. As with the last Dead Rising game there’s a complicated conspiracy in the background, but this is all just window dressing for a huge playground that encourages you to find ever more hilarious and novel methods of killing zombies.

In the Chuck Greene-verse of Dead Rising 2 poor old Chuck had been framed for the zombie escape and had to clear his name, for Frank the disaster is an opportunity for him to do some Lois Lane level investigative journalism and get back in the celebrity spotlight. He was a minor celebrity for a while after exposing the Wilamette disaster in the first game and taking a role in Terror is Reality was his dignity murdering downfall from fame. He’s about to leave with his money and turn his sad life around when the zombies escape.

Poor Frank now has to administer himself Zombrex at certain times to avoid going zombie. A few characters are shuffled around and the game moves around the survivors and magazines to make things more interesting. Lastly some new case file missions and psychos appear in the game to make things different than Dead Rising 2. Obviously Frank’s popular photograph ability is back so you can take snaps of the zombie horde for extra experience. But overall that’s about it; the game is in large parts the same. Although the plot does start to diverge noticeably towards the end.

There is the addition of the Sandbox mode. Now, instead of worrying about the anxious ticking off the clock to complete objectives and missions, you can just explore and kill zombies by the bucketful. Sometimes with a bucket as well; handy hint, you can attach power drills to make it a hilarious bucket of death. The sandbox mode is a good enough reason to pick up this reimagining as it gives you a previously unavailable opportunity to play with the games mechanics to your heart’s content.

One of the main draws of Dead Rising was that it mixed an almost zany fighting game with a tense time focused survival horror game. It’s about time it finally gave you the opportunity to experiment a little. Plus now you get to use Frank’s camera to photograph all the horrible gore and violence that you perpetrate, whether it’s shooting firecrackers into zombies heads or hacking of limbs with fire axes, it takes a long time to get bored.

If you loved Dead Rising games this is an easy purchase, an alternate version of the last game with some new bits and pieces to entertain. But it’s still Dead Rising 2 with the same issues, terrible survivor AI, punishing difficulty, odd levelling system that rewards restarting and awkward controls. But then again, it also has all the things that make the Dead Rising games so appealing, a cornucopia of weird weapons a visible sea of zombies (seriously, the number of zombies one screen at any one time never fails to impress) and thanks to the time based case system and difficult ‘psycho’ enemies, a legitimate gaming challenge. It’s recommended, especially if you missed the last game, but if not don’t be surprised when you’re replaying large parts of a game you’ve all ready put to bed.