Previews// Manhunt 2

Our man Danny seems to have volunteered himself for some dodgy treatment as part of a top secret weapons experiment he was involved in, the side effects of this being the reason why he’s found himself banged up in the Dixmore hospital for the criminally insane nuthouse for years. That is, until a freak electrical storm causes the hospital’s security system to go haywire. The lunatics, it seems, are taking over the asylum. Which is where the game starts.

Danny needs to sneak his way past guards – not to mention other crazy inmates (one of whom even decides to take a piss on poor old Dan) - by creeping carefully down the corridors and sticking closely to the shadows, keeping a close eye on the radar at the top of the screen which will alert you when guards are less likely to be aware of your presence.

Creeping past the guards is fairly straightforward at first, but pretty soon you come face to face with your first opponent, one of the other inmates who smacks you full on in the face. While Danny is, apparently, not used to violence, in no time at all you find yourself having no option but to beat the guy to a bloody pulp. Which soon seems to clear Danny of his fear of violence, as he is soon moving on to grab a syringe from a nearby room to stick it right into the neck of a nurse who is blocking your escape from the hospital.

Danny also has a mate called Leo who’s talking him through his escalating spree of ultra-violence to help him out of this hospital. As you make your way out of the hossie you will also discover the questionable thrills of sticking a pen in somebody’s eye or sticking a knife or some shards of glass into a victim’s neck. In seemingly no time, you manage to pick up a shotgun which means that you can stop sneaking through the shadows and instead you can joyously pistol-whip the interns or, should you lack imagination, just shoot them in the face as you run through the corridors.

Another new feature which the guys at Rockstar were very keen to show off in the game was the ‘environmental kills’ – shown off in a brothel area called ‘the Honey Pot’ - which simply refer to the various ways in which Danny makes use of objects around him (toilets, telephone cables, fuse boxes and so on) to take out his unsuspecting victims with ever more gruesome glee.

To be (brutally) honest, it was at this point of the demo where I found myself questioning the very point of Manhunt 2. Sure, the ‘kill animations’ and ‘environmental kills’ were hilariously over-the-top in terms of the level of gore and general squeamishness. We can imagine playing the game through for the first time and squealing with a kind of perverted delight at how well executed (sic) these in-game moves were. But then, we cannot imagine getting much pleasure from this game beyond the initial Beavis and Butthead-style “heh, check it out, I just stuck a pen in that dude’s EYE!”.

Overall, while the production values in the game are no doubt much-improved on the first game, I cannot shake the feeling that the game itself seems extremely limited. Unfortunately, while I want it to work on many levels, I find it hard to recommend Manhunt 2 in any way.

If you are aged ten to fourteen and you find extreme schlock horror style violence funny and cool, then you will probably love it. However, if you are a fan of games that involve a little more thought, strategy and challenge, then I cannot help but think that Manhunt 2 is going to fail to deliver.

Just like the worst kinds of original ‘video nasties’ Manhunt 2 contains enough darkly gruesome murder scenes to keep ‘fans of the genre’ happy to plod through the fairly tedious gameplay to get to the next darkly gruesome murder scene. However, I for one just hope that this is the last outing of this rather tedious game, which I cannot really describe in any better way than Rockstar’s Achilles heal.

The hardest thing, for me, is going to be the difficult job I’ll no doubt have of defending such an average, poorly-designed videogame when it gets yet another tabloid-press mauling around the time it launches later this summer.

The whole thing reminds me of that quote, usually attributed to Voltaire:

“I may disagree with what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it”…

Sometimes, it’s hard to be a liberal.