Spot on review
I agree with the review totally, with one small exception- I do think the game is worth buying despite its flaws. I thought the first Dead Rising was too broken to bother with (rubbish survivor AI, single save slot, short time limits, etc, etc). This one has sufficiently smoothed those rough edges to make the game more palatable, and there's lots of fun to be had combining items and seeing their effects on the zombie horde.
The review should perhaps have also highlighted the crippling load times. The game would have been much better served if they had found a way to stream the game world instead of serving it up in chunks with long loads between each section.
Making money could do with being easier too. Even with all the gambling "perk" magazines, it's still taking ages to afford the $2M I need for Knight Arthur's boots. There's still a helicopter, car and Hummer to buy after that!
The review is dead right about the annoying bosses too (I'm at level 50 now and the final boss and the secret one after that are still somewhat tricky). It's absolutely stupid that there aren't checkpoints before a boss. Weaving between zombies to get back to a boss fight isn't difficult, it's just time consuming, doubly so because of the long load times. So why force the player to do that instead of just having a checkpoint before the boss? Seems like obstinate game design to me.
Likewise the time limits are improved over the first, but I still fail to see the point of them. GTA doesn't take a mission away from you if you don't decide to undertake it in time. The game world is a fantastic one, filled with weapons (and combinations of weapons) that can used against the zombie horde, but the time limits mean you rarely get the time to go climbing and exploring the environment. If you do decide to explore, your reward is either to miss out on a mission or be heavily squeezed on the time left to do it.
So after all those complaints, it's still great fun to strap chainsaws to your motorbike and cut a huge swathe into the zombie horde, and it's probably worth buying for that alone. Maybe Blue Castle will be given free reign to ignore all of Keiji Inafune's stupid design decisions in Dead Rising 3...