My twelfth completed game of 2011 is Dead Rising 2 from Capcom and Blue Castle Games.

When Frank West was introduced to the world, no-one could have been more excited by his zombie-bashing escapades than yours truly. The prospect of running around an enclosed play area with literally hundreds of weapons at your disposal to use against the shuffling horde was enough to convince me to pick up my first Xbox 360 back in 2006. Despite discovering the truth behind the zombie outbreak, it was inevitable that the story would continue in some shape or form.

Taking place five years later, you get to play as Chuck Greene, a contestant in a Running Man-esque tv show, hoping to win the prize money that will allow him to purchase Zombrex – the drug he needs to keep his daughter from turning into a zombie. All hell breaks loose and the zombies once more maraud the streets, with Chuck being framed as the perpetrator. He’s got 72 hours to clear his name, keep his daughter alive, rescue survivors, incapacitate psychopaths and avoid becoming zombie chow.

Of course, he’s not completely helpless, being trapped in a casino/retail complex means you have even more weapons to choose from than Frank did, and also the ability to combine items to create unthinkable tools of destruction. Gaffer tape some knives to a pair of boxing gloves and you’ve got yourself a pair of home-made, snikkety snikt Wolverine claws. Or how about combining a sledgehammer and a fire axe to create The Defiler, guaranteed to make your enemy stay down.

And that’s just the beginning, this game quite literally is full to the brim of things to see and do, including a two player co-operative mode, and for the first time in a while I’ve actually found myself eager to carry on playing even though I’ve completed the storyline. Until I pick up a copy of my own though (this was a Lovefilm rental), I’ll have to get my zombie-slaying kicks by playing the downloadable epilogue – Case West.