Pop-quiz time in Sin City! You have 10 minutes to kill as many zombies as humanly possible. In front of you lies a giant hammer and a wideopen street packed with hundreds of moan-faced shufflers. What do you do? Answer: Institute Hammer Time, of course! Go all crazy and bang away at them to see if you can collect enough points to meet the requirements. But what if it takes longer than 10 minutes? Get creative and it won’t. In Dead Rising 2, you aren’t limited to just the straight and narrow — you have plenty of other ways to skin a reanimated cat…er, corpse.

We went all hands-on with a short but meaty new area in Dead Rising 2’s zombified Vegas strip — a street lined with newly infected undead, odd little retail shops, and a handful of out-of-the-way workbenches for creating interesting new weapons. Using something the game calls “Combo Cards,” you’re able to combine disparate weapons and items into more powerful, wacky death-dealers. Approach any workbench with an object, put it on the tabletop, then find a second item to combine it with. If there’s a marriage to be made between the two, you’ll come away with something truly special. And hopefully brutally lethal.

For one combination, we used the workbench to stick bowie knives onto a pair of boxing gloves. Either weapon alone would work just fine in the sea of enemies; but together, you’re swinging the makeshift equivalent of Wolverine’s adamantiuminfused claws, using quick jabs to put the serious hurt on giant groups of baddies. The combo weapons don’t last indefinitely, but you can stack them in your inventory to access anytime until they go bust. In fact, we kept our paddle-’n’-chainsaw combo for as long as we could to do enough killin’ to meet the 10-minute goal of 20,000 Prestige Points (PP).

But what if you’re looking for a quick fix instead of chasing down combos for workbenches? If you’ve got the paper, you can poke your head into any number of shops along the strip. Some carry straight-up weapons — like a, ahem, “massager” that’s really just a pleasant euphemism for something much more risqué — while others offer pre-made combo weapons for purchase. Picking up a propane tank that’s already wedded with some spikes makes for a nice kaboom-style bomb if you manage to stick it on a zombie’s head and shoot it with a firearm. There are seemingly countless ways to dole out pain to the shufflers on the street, and half the game’s fun might just be finding all of them.

When we finally passed the 20,000 PP mark, though, we were treated to a special unlockable: the chance to ride a motorcycle equipped with dual chainsaws that can cut a mad swath through the masses. How does this small nibble of Dead Rising 2’s overall gory glee fit into the main crux of your story-based adventure? Will the whole game be broken up into these mini-challenges? We’re still waiting for the answers, but until then, we’ve got Combo Cards to find.